From Atoms to Patterns

http://www.wellcomecollection.org/exhibitionsandevents/pastexhibitionsandevents/fromatomstopatterns/index.htm

http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/from_atoms_to_patterns/

exploring the crystal structure designs commissioned by the Festival Pattern Group

In 1937 Helen Megaw presented her friend Dorothy Hodgkin with a linen cushion as a wedding gift. She had embroidered onto the cushion, in silver, red and blue thread, the pattern of the crystal structure of aluminium hydroxide. Megaw was not an artist or craftsperson, and her seemingly bizarre choice of design was no Conceptual statement or Surrealist strategy. Rather, it was her first attempt to apply to a domestic object the patterns she encountered through her work as a scientific researcher, and it was the starting-point for an idea that was to come to fruition years later at the 1951 Festival of Britain.