Junia Farquhar

Artist

Junia Farquhar · artblocks.io/artists/junia-farquhar ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/junia-farquhar ↗

Based

Born 1997, Oxford, England. Lives and works in Oxford, England

Practice

Generative art shaped by physics, mathematics, animation, creative coding, and the material language of drawing

In the set

Dipolar ↗ · 256 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Junia Farquhar is a British generative artist and physicist whose work joins scientific models to an attentive study of mark, motion, and visual texture. Art Blocks identifies her as born in Oxford in 1997 and describes her as a DPhil physicist studying magnetic quantum materials.¹ That combination matters to the work without reducing it to scientific illustration. Farquhar uses computation to establish relationships among many small elements, then allows their collective behaviour to produce images that feel drawn, weathered, or physically deposited.

Her practice connects rigorous academic research with creative coding and an interest in plotter output.¹ This concern with emergence, in which local instructions accumulate into an organic-looking whole, provides a useful context for the concentrated system of Dipolar. The work treats physical ideas as a basis for abstraction rather than presenting a literal scientific diagram.

A field made visible

Released through Art Blocks Curated on 14 December 2022, Dipolar comprises exactly 256 editions.² Its title places the project in the conceptual territory of interacting poles and fields, but the results resist the cleanliness of a textbook illustration. Across the series, repeated linear components gather into bands, vortices, partitions, and turbulent enclosures. Individual marks appear coordinated by invisible pressures, so that each image reads less as an arrangement of objects than as a record of forces.

The compositions balance continuity and interruption. Dense currents can suddenly open into pale channels, while adjacent groups of strokes adopt competing orientations. Color often clarifies these regions, yet it also introduces ambiguity: contrasting fields can seem layered, colliding, or passing through one another. The visual effect depends on multiplicity. No single line explains the image, just as no single particle adequately describes a collective physical state.

This framework also separates Farquhar's project from a literal simulation. Dipolar uses the cultural and visual associations of physics as material for abstraction. Its algorithm produces animated, browser-native works, while individual records remain identifiable as Ethereum tokens. Raster's presentation of edition 11 provides animation controls alongside options for a high-resolution image and an SVG suitable for plotting.³ Those viewing modes reveal how the project can move among screen, file, and physical trace.

Live on Art Blocks: dipolar-by-junia-farquhar ↗

From code to exhibition

The series gains meaning through comparison across its 256 editions. Recurring structures establish a recognizable grammar, while differences in density, orientation, palette, and spatial division demonstrate the range held inside that grammar. The edition is therefore not merely a supply figure. It defines a bounded experiment, large enough for patterns and exceptions to become legible.

Dipolar treats the image as evidence of a system in motion, not as a fixed diagram of that system.

The project subsequently entered an exhibition context beyond its original release. Assembly included Farquhar in Collecting the Future: Photography and Generative Art on the Blockchain, a 2023 exhibition that placed recent generative projects beside works associated with the earlier history of Art Blocks.⁴ The presentation connected Farquhar with artists including Matt DesLauriers and Aranda\Lasch, while Art Blocks identifies Dipolar as her work shown there.¹

Farquhar's position between laboratory research and creative coding encourages a precise reading of her abstraction. The work is neither a decorative application of scientific imagery nor a claim that code removes artistic judgment. Instead, it presents system design as a form of composition. Rules establish the field, but the artist's choices determine which behaviours, textures, colors, and temporal effects become perceptible. In Dipolar, computation becomes a way to see relationships that no isolated mark could carry alone.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Junia Farquhar links page ↗.