A decade after its conception during nocturnal talks with MONA founder David Walsh, Conrad Shawcross’s The Nervous System (Umbilical) (2025) emerges as the climactic act of his 25-year Rope Makers cycle. Towering at 10 metres, its 40 articulated arms trace elliptical orbits across a 12-metre diameter, each rotation incrementally spinning a rope that will never duplicate its pattern.
Fabricated within Shawcross’ Hackney studio—part sculpture, part precision chronometer—the machine translates cosmic mechanics into tangible form. Spools mimic planetary aberrations, their asynchronous rotations mirroring our solar system’s gradual flattening as it hurtles through the galaxy. The rope, pulled taut through the centre, becomes a helical record of celestial motion, echoing the sun’s trajectory alongside 891 moons. Yet beneath this astronomical allegory lies deliberate instability: the system’s asymmetry breeds chaos, its movements hovering between order and collapse.
Shawcross positions the work as a grimly poetic analogue for planetary systems—both climatic and celestial. Like climate models that reveal vulnerability through granular data, Umbilical renders visible the latent fragility of seemingly stable systems. The rope accrues as a physical timeline; future kinks or flaws will betray disturbances initiated months prior, echoing environmental feedback loops where cause and effect span generations.
Accompanying the premiere are two pivotal earlier works: Yarn (2001) and Ode to the Difference Engine (2007), both oak-framed prototypes from his Slade years. These rudimentary machines, with their hand-cranked rhythms, ground Shawcross’s ongoing interrogation of time’s metaphors—not as answers, but as open questions cast in wood and motion.
Come November, Umbilical will embark for Hobart, where MONA will house it permanently from 2027. There, it will run uninterrupted save for annual spool changes, its growing coil of rope materialising as a Sisyphean ledger of time’s passage. Each segment will mark a historical moment; each irregularity, a delayed consequence.
Location: Timber Yard, Here East (adjacent to V&A Storehouse), Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London E15 2GW
Date 10 September (private view), 11 September November (public access, 10 am–6 pm daily)
Commissioned by: Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Tasmania