Artist’s Statement

In liaison with the Western Australian State Government Department of Aboriginal Welfare, Robert Pope established a special and successful science-art school for aboriginal Australians in 1969. He was awarded a State Government bursary to collate his science-art research in 1973.

He was appointed Artist-in-residence to the University of Adelaide in 1978 and his life’s work was documented by the Science Unit of Australian Commonwealth Broadcasting Commission for inclusion into the eight part international television series, The Scientists – Profiles in Discovery in 1979. In the same year he was appointed by UNESCO as special science-art delegate to the Second Marcel Grossmann World Summit Meeting of Science held in Trieste to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the birth date of Albert Einstein.

Robert Pope founded the Science-Art Research Centre at Lock 4 in the Riverland of South Australia. The Centre’s objective to modernise the classic Greek Science for Ethical Ends was recorded in the special Science-Art edition of the August, 1980, volume of Scientific Australian. Several morphogenetic papers by the Centre’s mathematician, Chris Illert, were published during the 1980s by Italy’s leading scientific journal, Il Nuovo Cimento. Two of these papers were reprinted in Washington by the SPIE Milestone Series as selected important works of the 20th Century. In 1994 the mathematics was extended to a “New Important Physics” published by the Institute for Basic Research in the USA. Reprinted in 1995, the work was acclaimed for the discovery of new physics laws governing optimum (human) biological growth and development, which validated the Centre’s objective recorded 15 years earlier in Scientific Australian.

In 1986 Robert Pope was awarded an Artist-in-residency at the University of Sydney to work with a cancer research team at the Queen Elizabeth II Medical Centre. In 1988 he published his correction to Leonardo da Vinci’s THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE in the book, Two B