EX OVO OMNIA
Fastwürms:
EX OVO OMNIA
Unveiled September 21, 2000
Titled after the inscription by William Harvey on the title
page of De generatione animalium, first edition, 1651,
Fastwürms' Ex Ovo Omnia or ‘everything comes from
the egg' was the 22nd addition to the Art Centre's Sculpture
Park. Just as Harvey's famous text marks the beginning
of the science of embryology, Ex Ovo Omnia
was designed to be the ‘egg' of a new millennium.
Ex Ovo Omnia is a public sculpture shaped by the future and the adventures of science: the space capsule, the bathysphere, the egg, the biological cell and the nucleus of DNA. Standing 2.8 metres high with a diameter of 3 metres, Ex Ovo Omnia is a sphere punctuated with glass portholes that offer a glimpse of a micro interior world. A steel and stained glass strand of DNA spirals through the centre of the sphere surrounded by painted crests depicting hybrid bestiaries and charges of medieval heraldry. Organic white fibreglass forms seem to creep and grow within the globe, like an incubation tank or a strange green house.
The Guelph Yale is part of the Ex Ovo Omnia interior display. The Guelph Yale has the build of a mountain goat with swivelling ram horns, the tail of a panther and the ears of a donkey. The colour of the Guelph Yale is white powdered with silver bezants and pentagrams, and has gold horns, tushes, tufts and copper split hooves.
Using the language of spectacle, adventure, entertainment and space exploration, Ex Ovo Omnia represents the new century and the revolutions in science that shape it. In close proximity to the University of Guelph one of Canada's leading biological and agricultural research centres, Ex Ovo Omnia is intended to celebrate the past and future of a world where everything that is natural becomes cultural.
Fastwürms' Ex Ovo Omnia was purchased through the Florence G. Partridge Fund in consultation with the Ontario Agricultural College with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance Program 2000. The 22nd permanently installed sculpture in the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre's Donald Forster Sculpture Park.