JP’s abstract sculptures can be all at once more architectural and less architectural than many ‘literal’ building proposals, though never predictably so.’

John makes his own contribution in a short essay exploring the link between the inversion principle and music. He points to the similarity between the inversion principle and the twelve-note method devised by Arnold Schoenberg. John writes ‘Using the sphere of inversion, when the infinite number of points surrounding the sphere are inverted to inside the sphere, the points become more compact the nearer they are to the centre of the sphere (the centre of inversion). If these points are interpreted as sound, then a stage is reached when one musical note cannot be distinguished from another and the sound becomes an intense and dense noise. This feeling of angst seems to flow through most of the music of the Second Viennese School, as reflected in the works of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. The same effect can be achieved with MP.MQ= MR2 ’.

In his essay entitled ‘Perfect imperfect’, the engineer and writer, Chris Wise, takes a critical look at John’s choice of the inversion principle. He writes:

‘The Pickering paradox lies in the gulf between the mathematical purity of the inversion principle and the physical imperfection of the work. Why build anything at all? Why not just leave the work as a string of numbers? Here I can only guess, but I imagine that for him there is much more to it than the numbers. I suspect that the importance of these pieces is private. Only he has experienced what’s in there, and only he sees the sublime pathos as the mathematical language is gloriously revealed in its imprecise physical reality. Substance increasingly ceases to matter as long as the forms can simply exist as a framework onto which the pure numbers can be projected. So Pickering uses the shapes as the memory of his mathematical journey.’