Music and the inversion principle 

The inversion principle can be used for transforming one thing into another, for both large- and small-scale form.  It produces a certain skeletal consistency but it is not the rigid system one might suppose, as it allows the artist imaginative choices and flexibility, enabling personality to be imposed as part of the process.  Logic is nothing to be afraid of when applied to art; it is simply part of human thought, spatial relations, balance and the law of nature. It is the human imprint on the method of inversion that is of real significance.

Karlheinz Stockhausen has forged a new musical language that has profoundly inspired me, giving rise to various parallels in my work.  For example in his Kontakte, the composer uses what he calls 'moment form' to make 'vertical incisions' that 'break through the horizontal concept of time'. In Klavierstück X, he includes long silences when the listener is meant to complete the space from his memory of what has gone before.

Stockhausen has thus introduced a completely revolutionary way of listening to music, and I see this music as enfolded within the beauty of the sensual spatial curves of inversion. I like to imagine Stockhausen's music being performed inside one of my own structures (made on a grand scale), so that the sensuality of the music emanates from the curvaceous sculpture around it.

John Pickering