“There are things that I see happen when I’m working with a material that tell me something about gravity, space, force. I’m interested in showing that idea through the artwork.”

—Alyson Shotz

The form of Eccentric Orbit was born from Shotz’s investigation of the complex entanglements of wire in her studio. These wire balls, the artist thought, resembled dark matter clumps, or a probability cloud of an electron’s orbit around an atom. In Eccentric Orbit, Shotz magnifies this atomic phenomenon exponentially, rendering it first in a computer model followed by large curves of silicon bronze. The form pushes the boundaries of modernist, minimalist sculpture, a movement historically known for its solid, heavy and static industrial forms. Instead, Eccentric Orbit utilizes similar materials to a new end: a fluid and seemingly weightless artwork that allows for permeability and translucency, which here is accomplished through the empty spaces that largely make up the object’s voluminous form. Through its erratic orbit around a virtual center, Eccentric Orbit is an endless knot, with no beginning or end in sight, referencing the never-ending rotation of an atom’s electrons and resulting in a perceptually unique, organic expression of the atomic.