In physics, “energy is an indirectly observed quantity. It is often understood as the ability a physical system has to do work on other physical systems.” Energy cannot be “destroyed or created”. But it can be “transferred or transformed”.
However, in arts and architecture, energy can be created. The following photos of the works by London artist Kate MccGwire and Spanish engineer Eduardo Torroja have enchanted the viewers the haunting energy empowered in forms.
MccGwire’s feather sculptures and Torraja’s bus station are all “still” artifacts. Not any types of energies (like heat, sounds, etc.) are released from the forms. But they gave us a kind of visual impression that create reverberation in our mental perceptions. The unseen magical power seems to be incarnated into the fluid forms through the expression of feathers and concrete. The overall visual impulses are furthered enhanced by the directional arrangement of the feathers and the joint lines of the concrete shell. In these cases, we can say that energies are generated by the artists’ pure efforts of creations with struggles of maintaining their original concepts and aesthetic preferences. I think both MccGwire and Torroja’s works meet historian Simon Schama’s description on arts. They have “the power to shake us into revelation and rip us from our default mode of seeing. After an encounter with that force, we don’t look at a face, a colour, a sky, a body, in quite the same way again. We get fitted with new sight: in-sight. Visions of beauty or a rush of intense pleasure are part of that process, but so too may be shock, pain, desire, pity, even revulsion. That kind of art seems to have rewired our senses. We apprehend the world differently.”