‘Number in Time and Space: exploring Plato’s fifth element’ is a combination of antiquities, contemporary art and digital projection that aims to both unlock and reunite Britain’s lost culture. It runs 20 to 31 August, at the Minories gallery, Colchester, Essex.
Guest Blog by James D. Wenn, Consultant, Byrga Geniht
“What can we do?”
The ageless cry of troubled times is always most shocking when fresh and sincere; but the records of history, despite their softening distance, contain wisdom gleaned from the survivors of calamities at least as terrifying as our own. Some of these records speak more clearly than others, and it is our mission at Byrga Geniht to unpick the meanings woven into the designs of buildings and material culture.
Work in the NUMBER IN TIME AND SPACE exhibition
Our work at Soulton over the past several years has put a spotlight on the legacy of Old Sir Rowland Hill and his values — as a philanthropist and steady statesman. Soulton Hall encodes prosocial values into its very fabric through mathematics and geometry, in a language that reaches far further back in time, and forward till surprisingly recently. It was the horror of World War I that we think caused a rupture in the transmission of traditional symbolism in architecture. People turned away from anything reminiscent of a world that they felt had failed. Yet our research into the meaning behind familiar patterns all around us shows the original deeper meanings have wisdom for all the ages, and the allegory that underpins them all — the ability of a special shape, called the rhombic dodecahedron, to tessellate 3D space, indicating a perfect society — is the subject of our exhibition this August.
The sixteenth-century Renaissance at Soulton, and its preservation of the ‘As You Like It’ dance in the famous Dancing Pavement (a photograph of which will feature in the exhibition), is just one of many snapshots of our history connected through the research. It is the way everything — from Roman mosaics and the Vision of Constantine, through the glittering Anglo-Saxon treasures of the Staffordshire Hoard and Sutton Hoo, the Coronation Pavement at Westminster Abbey and eighteenth-century country houses, right down to dances of the Victorian era — owes its form to one philosophical inspiration that gives us hope to wake up an old engine that has served our culture so well through wars, plagues and famines before.
There is enough presented in the exhibition, we believe, to kick-start a renewal of our culture, and bring back confidence to Britain. Hosted by the oldest art gallery in the first city to be built in Britain, we are right in the cradle of a new Renaissance and it feels an appropriate venue to bring together different chapters of the story embodied by different places spread around the country, such as Westminster Abbey and of course Soulton Hall.
We are very grateful to Soulton Hall and the Ashton Family for their custom, philanthropy and support, both with the research and with contribution of exhibits. If you, too, want our vision to succeed, and want to be responsible for part of that success, please visit the exhibition in Colchester and spread the word. It is this call to action that is the step between the potential we hold, and making a positive difference for this country.
For readers unable to make the trip to Essex, we will be appearing on ‘The Rest is History’ podcast with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook in September to discuss the Anglo-Saxon or early medieval phase of the research — discoveries in the history of mathematics we have made that have been endorsed by Professor Marcus du Sautoy.
Details of the exhibition: https://www.theminories.org/event/numbers-time-space
Byrga Geniht: https://linktr.ee/byrgageniht
