Density Cusp

A happy return to Allenheads Contemporary Arts for Continuum research.

It is a place which pulls you in like gravity or a magnetic field. It would be no surprise to find a wormhole portal here.

Joined by Annie Carpenter, Nicola Ellis and Robert Good we spent the time reading, walking, thinking and sharing ideas.

“The miners did not find the riches they hoped for and the tunnel never reached its destination…”

Theoretically it is possible that wormholes exist. Every point in spacetime could be connected by a hidden web of tiny wormholes left over from the beginning when the universe was turbulent and unformed. Should they be discovered, to open them and pass through would require a colossal amount of negative energy which we are unable to create with current technology. However, there is a lot of metaphysical negative energy around at the moment so maybe this could be used to power a wormhole.

The Allenheads Blacksmith’s Forge seems a good place to open a wormhole portal. It is a place of high energy collisions and hot fusion.

It is also home to a collection of local rocks and crystals which must surely offer some negative energy cleansing properties. For research imagery my glass sphere encapsulates and condenses its surroundings. If the image is made to spin fractals begin to appear.

I also captured the landscape at speed as travel through the wormhole would exceed the speed of light.

I probed the depths of rabbit holes with an endoscope camera and discovered alien landscapes and the hidden web of the interconnected root system.

We made a site visit to Newcastle University to view the space that Allenheads Contemporary Arts will performatively occupy during The Late Shows

As the project Continuum focuses on ideas around speculative fiction the newly installed Museum of Classic Sci-Fi in Allendale made an interesting day out with an impressive collection of artefacts and information.

Plasmaton:”ramdomly formed blobs of protein, wrought into being ‘psychokinetically’ …”

The Cosmic Sublime exhibition presented by Lumen Studios opened at The Pie Factory in Margate. The concept of the sublime has long been associated to both fields of astronomy. Derived from the Latin “sublimis”, the sublime is translated as “set or raised aloft, high up”- etymologically the word “sublime” is very much linked to the space above our planet and to what may inhabit it.

I was pleased to show the video Soft Borders made with dance artist Paola Napolitano.

The video speculates on the idea of a universe that is a finite shape but has no borders. If we were able to exit at one point we would immediately re-enter at another point. It also considers our body in a similar way with open borders for the unseen passage of cosmic rays and other particles.

Thanks to artist Rosie Reed Gold for some great photos of the show.

My wonderful optician John Rose spent some time scanning my iris for me.

This is for work I am planning looking at the possibility that we retain some residual magnetoreceptor in our eyes that once enabled us to navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field. And other ideas.

In 2019 the Lizard is celebrating the 400 year anniversary of Sir John Killigrew’s building of the first lighthouse on Lizard Point in 1619. The lighthouse also has important links to the search for reliable Longitude measurement, with an assistant to the astronomer royal visiting the lighthouse at the time of the first Transit of Venus to record an accurate location for the Lizard Rocks.

Following on from the Lizard Point Residency I have made a mock up to test the Fresnel lens projection work. A film exploring entanglement and communication across distances will be back projected onto the lens.

Joined by Anne Krinsky and Carol Wyss, we made another site visit to St. Augustine’s Tower in Hackney and made some decisions about who would install where for our upcoming group show which will be titled Reading Stones.

Reading Stones were the original tool for magnifying text, first made from polished glass or crystal in the 13th Century – the same era the tower was built.

I will be installing in the room that houses the clock mechanism. It is a wonderful animated machine. On the way home reading Carlo Ravelli’s book The Order of Time I came to the passages quoting from St. Augustine.

“It is within my mind then, that I measure time. I must not allow my mind to insist that time is something objective. When I measure time, I am measuring something in the present of my mind. Either this is time, or I have no idea what time is.”

The British Library have released some excellent scans from their archives for free use.

While in Suffolk visiting family I made a detour to Dunwich and found the tide clock has become redundant.

Time and Tide wait for no man. The earliest known record is from St. Marher,  1225: “And te tide and te time þat tu iboren were, schal beon iblescet.”

In my present, the ruins of Greyfriars Monastery at Dunwich where large chunks of the coastline have fallen into the sea.

The last gravestone standing as the land crumbles

In the studio –  Sugar lift for work looking at cycles and forces

Copper sulphate etching

Four colour separation screen-print

I made two pieces – one delicate etch, one fierce

This is an amalgamation of images from the ruined Waverley Abbey and St. James Church Weybridge – not ruined in my present. Sanctified spaces drawing people to them who seek transformation. All matter becomes regenerated.

Out of  the studio…

Another Land at Kingston Museum, a showcase of experimental visualisations of place to draw links between creative practice and anthropology, archaeology, architecture and geography.

 

 

 

I liked the collection of remote controls –  accidental installation

 

 

 

Anamorphic Waves at Ugly Duck.

An exhibition exploring how digital interfaces and technological tools are reshaping our personal, professional and ecological relationships, and how they have modified our view of love, sexuality and gender.

I liked this work looking at big data. I was intrigued how the multiple projections were installed, baffling as only two projectors in the room and neither seemed to be pointing in the right direction.

Mesmerising images from Stuart Faromarz Batchelor who explained some of his methods working with oil paint and coding algorithms which respond to the brush strokes via a camera link at the latest Flux Social Event.

Visceral and beautiful work at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle, the exhibition presents a dialogue between oil paintings by Francis Bacon and Morphia, a series of works on paper by Ellen Gallagher.

Great installation looking at the moon from an earthbound perspective from Shaney Barton. Anomalous Mass is showing at Allenheads Contemporary Arts Gallery as part of the Continuum series of events. Multiple screens show footage captured of the moon over a ten-month period with found dialogues on recent moon histories and projected near futures of the moon race and plans for human colonisation.

Wonderful poetic visons, some realised some imaginary from Katie Paterson at Turner Contemporary with A place that exists only in moonlight.

Like Paterson, JMW Turner was fascinated by the sublime wonder of nature, capturing the changing and atmospheric qualities of light, air and weather in his paintings, while also being deeply curious about science and the physical world. Paterson has selected a group of over 20 Turner watercolours and paintings to be interspersed with her works.

Also on display were some of Caroline Herschel’s notebooks describing her extraordinary astronomical discoveries of comets made by patient observation.

Great to be able to see the screening of Sarah Sparkes film Time You Need and her GHost Tunnel installation in The GHost Parlour at New Art Projects. The GHost Tunnel references portals, black holes and equates time travel with death as another dimension that we may enter.

The film gently leads the viewer on a journey beyond the physical and explores the potential for consciousness to time-travel within the material limits of the human body.