Conrad Shawcross: The Nervous System (Umbilical)
11th September, 2025 – 2nd November, 2025
Timber Yard
Here East (next to V&A Storehouse)
Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park
London E15 2GW
Talks & events throughout the exhibition
In his most ambitious work to date, British artist Conrad Shawcross unveils a 10-metre-tall, 12-metre-wide machine whose endless orbits create a rope that maps the rhythms, instability and wonder of the cosmos.
British artist Conrad Shawcross has built his largest and most intricate “rope machine” to date — a 10-metre-tall, 12-metre-wide apparatus titled The Nervous System (Umbilical). When it begins operating this autumn, forty interlocking arms will rotate in a sequence of orbits that never repeats, slowly producing a rope that coils at its base like a physical record of time passing.
Courtesy of the artist
The work belongs to Shawcross’s long-running “Rope Makers” series, which began more than 25 years ago during his studies at the Slade School of Fine Art. Its origins trace to a late-night conversation with David Walsh, founder of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania. That discussion — about machinery, the cosmos and systems that resist repetition — eventually led to this monumental, permanently installed commission for MONA.
Constructed over several years, the machine blends engineering precision with speculative design. Shawcross likens its movements to the solar system, with spools orbiting in ways that echo the irregular paths of planets around the sun. The rope drawn through the center represents the sun’s own trajectory through the galaxy, dragging planets and moons along their spiraling paths.
Although the machine’s output is tangible — an umbilical-like rope — its motion is inherently unstable. Small asymmetries in its cycles create unpredictable patterns, evoking the fragility of complex systems. Shawcross sees parallels with Earth’s climate: the closer one studies its interconnections, the more vulnerable the whole appears.
Courtesy of the artist
Two earlier rope machines, Yarn (2001) and Ode to the Difference Engine (2007), will accompany the new piece in an exhibition in London. Built from oak, these earlier works reflect Shawcross’s initial investigations into time and metaphor, offering no clear answers but inviting reflection on the mechanics of the universe.
When the exhibition closes in November, The Nervous System (Umbilical) will be dismantled, shipped to Hobart, and reassembled in a dedicated atrium at MONA, where it is scheduled to begin continuous operation in 2027. The spools will be changed annually; the rope will accumulate over decades. Variations or faults in the orbiting arms may only become visible in the rope months later, a delay that Shawcross compares to the long chain of causes behind natural events.
For Shawcross, the work is both sculpture and model: a visual embodiment of past, present and future, and a reminder that stability — whether mechanical, planetary or human — may be more precarious than it appears.
Conrad Shawcross: The Nervous System (Umbilical) opens on the 11th of September, 2025 until the 2nd of November, 2025 at Timber Yard
©2025 Conrad Shawcross
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