V    QUINTESSENCE   :  The Sphere inscribed in a Cube

This installation is a reinterpretation of the universal symbolism of the squaring of the circle.
"Quintessence” was the name given by the ancient philosophers to the ether – the element which filled the universe and the infinite expanses beyond fire, air, water and earth, and which held everything in its place.
The term was also used by the alchemists, who called themselves the “abstractors of the quintessence”, and by the freemasons who followed the same precepts.
The use of the term quintessence in cosmology is a nod to the Ancient Greek concept of the ether.
There are four different types of matter or energy in the universe: baryonic matter, made up of common atoms; photons, of which the cosmic microwave background is composed; neutrinos, produced during the Big Bang and forming the cosmic neutrino background; and black matter, the exact nature of which is unknown.
The quintessence is a potential model for the recently posited dark energy, which is the hypothetical fifth form of energy present in the Universe and has been suggested as a possible explanation for the fact that its expansion can be seen to be accelerating.
By way of tribute to the Renaissance’s humanist ideas, the Harcourt Glass is symbolically inscribed in a circle like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. It thus serves as a representation of Man and his capacity to discover, understand and create – the quintessence of the expertise we have acquired since the discovery of tools and the mastery of fire, metal and glass as determining factors in the history of our civilizations.
This fifth work elevates the Harcourt Glass beyond its status as a relic into the realms of a time-honored icon, by framing it within a contemporary modernity and “squaring” it in order to impart illumination and hence immortality.