Libby Heaney’s Growler (2024) is a glass sculpture that looks anything but. Despite its crystalline surface, it appears as if viscous, gummy and glutinous as it sags and drips down the side of its plinth. You might expect it to be goopy if you happened to prod it. Less glass, it resembles slime.

Slime, for Heaney, represents more than a material metaphor. It evokes a kind of primal ooze. All multicellular life forms depend on some viscous gel, she told me, citing Susanne Wedlich’s The Natural History of Slime. But for the British artist, the goo symbolizes something deeper: the quantum principle known as entanglement, a reactive state that’s exactly as it sounds.

“We think we’re contained and bound, but really, we’re oozing over other people’s boundaries. It’s about our propensity to entangle,” she said over the phone. “Personally, sometimes, I see myself as slimy and overflowing.”

Quantum physics has long been a cornerstone of Heaney’s practice. A scientist turned artist, she leverages quantum technology in a practice foregrounded by quantum thinking and feeling. As expressions of the quantum realm, her forms are fluid and unfixed, venturing narratives and landscapes that are irrational, almost disorienting. To even describe her work, as I’m doing now, diminishes their sheer sweep—they’re meant to elude definition.

It’s this same instability that has increasingly drawn other artists into the quantum orbit in recent years. There, where things are non-binary and ever-shifting, they’ve found new computing tools for art-making as much as an arena for rethinking boundaries. That, as Heaney suggested, is the point: “Consciousness is too limited right now,” she said, “so I think we have to approach quantum through embodiment.”

Just What Is Quantum?

To understand quantum mechanics is to go microscopic, down to atomic scale. Here, matter and light behave in ways that defy classical physics. Particles entangle across distances, tunnel through barriers, exist in states of uncertainty, and occupy two conditions at once. It’s wild. Or, as Tommaso Calarco, physicist and professor at the University of Bologna, put it to me: “Quantum is fun because it makes no sense whatsoever.”

Yet, for all its peculiarity, quantum theory has yielded bedrock notions that undergird fields from quantum chemistry to quantum computing. Among them, there’s superposition, in which particles (or qubits, in the case of quantum computers) could be both “on” and “off” at the same time; and entanglement, wherein particles can share a single state across space. Underlying it all is intrinsic randomness, the uncertainty that comes with measuring a quantum system.