Conrad Shawcross talks to The Telegraph ahead of Shadows of the Mechanism opening at Victoria Miro

'From that three-hour conversation, it’s easy to draw a line to Shawcross’s Time Pebbles, a series of striking, complex geometrical sculptures that go on show this month at the Victoria Miro gallery in London in an exhibition called Shadows of the Mechanism. They are plainly exquisite objects, as mysterious as the monolithic spaceships of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) and as intricate as an early Swiss watch: the one that stood in Regent’s Park this summer, Shawcross shows me, fitted together like a 3D aluminium puzzle, without welding or bolts. The last thing he wants them to be is didactic, he insists, but “they have to be poetic”. He’s nervous of them being “too seductive”, he adds, “but hopefully, they do have a kind of… obviously they’re very…” The word he absolutely cannot bring himself to say is “beautiful”, but they are.' – Chris Harvey

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November 13 2026