Archives for posts with tag: art

The footsteps of Magnes

October 5, 2025 //

In Pliny’s Natural History (published after his death in the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius, when, ever curious, he had gone to investigate the strange cloud rising), he marvels at the powers of the magnet ‘For what, in fact, is there endowed with more marvellous properties than this?’; ‘What is there in existence more inert than a piece of rigid stone? And yet, behold! Nature has endowed stone with both sense and hands! He goes on to assert that ‘it received its name “magnes”, Nicander informs us, by the person who was the first to discover it, upon Ida’. ‘Magnes, it is said, made this discovery, when, upon taking his herds to pasture, he found that the nails of his shoes and the iron ferrel of his staff adhered to the ground.’

Nicander was a 2nd century BC Greek poet, physician, and grammarian and there is no surviving record of his claim. Gillian Turner, in her book North Pole, South Pole, admits that this story will have been embellished over time but acknowledges that if an electrical storm took place on Mount Ida and the naturally magnetic magnetite was struck by lightning, it would be permanently magnetised into lodestone and would therefore attract the nails of Magnes’s shoes.

The legend is not impossible but it is also possible the stone is named after the region where it was first found. In ancient Greek, magnetite was known as magnes lithos. There were two ancient regions called Magnesia and so the true provenance of the first discovery of the lodestone is hard to determine. In Greece, ancient Magnesia was a long and narrow slip of country in Thessaly between Mounts Ossa and Pelion. Around the 4th Century BC, the people known as Magnetes, migrated and settled in Ionian cities which were named after them as Magnesia on the Maeander and the neighbouring Magnesia ad Sipylum, currently in Aydın Province near Ephesus, Turkey.

I decided to follow the footsteps of Magnes.

Mount Ida is famous in Greek Mythology as the location for the Judgement of Paris, where he fatefully chose Aphrodite as the most beautiful goddess, setting in motion the events of the Trojan War which the gods watched from its summit while its fir trees were felled to build the Trojan Horse. It was also an ancient sacred site for worship of the mother goddess Cybele, an embodiment of a universal Mother Earth. Its name was changed to Kazdağı (Goose Mountain) as the goose holds sacred significance in Turkish mythology. The landscape is literally breath-taking with very high oxygen levels due to the extensive pine forests and unique geographic features that funnel ionised air up from the sea to mix with the clear mountain air.

Setting out on the first evening the walk to view the mountain brought home the vastness of the landscape to negotiate.

After dinner, the owner of our hotel in Zeytinli said he would find a guide to the area if we gave him 5 minutes. Thinking he would come back with a book of hiking trails, I was surprised when he returned with a Kazdağı National Park Ranger. We arranged to meet the next day when he led us up the dusty mountain tracks with his old school friend as driver.

The summit of Mount Ida was always in the distance and it is not possible to walk unaccompanied in the National Park during the summer season. We drove up to a height of 800m to view the spectacular Sahinderesi Canyon.

Mount Ida abounds with fresh water springs, rivers, ponds and waterfalls including the Sütüven Waterfall which we visited.

We visited the Ida Madra Geopark Museum which displayed tantalising exhibits of magnetite crystal and volcanic rock but there was only a security guard on duty who could offer no information about the collection or the local geology. The magnetite crystal does look like a broken magnet rather than raw crystal.

Fascinating choice of sentence to describe magnetite in the Turkish-English online dictionary – ‘Category, Turkish, English. Technical. 1, Technical, manyetit · magnetite n. The enzyme dissolved the brain tissue and left the magnetite particles intact.‘

Outside the museum was a tomb that our guide told us is called ‘the man eating stone’. Pliny also talks about a stone called sarcophagus (stone of Assos) of which he says ‘It is a well-known fact, that dead bodies, when buried in this stone, are consumed in the course of forty days, which the sole exception of the teeth.’ There was also a magnificent Oriental Plane Tree, over 570 years old.

We visited the wonderfully eccentric Tahtakuşlar Ethnographic Museum which celebrates the cultural heritage of nomadic Turkish tribes and displays a stone tablet inscribed with the symbol of a goose foot reflecting the veneration of the goose by the Turkmen people. There is a rather faded model of Mount Ida which apparently shows the line of a mysterious ancient structure that circles the summit.

The next day we made another winding ascent. Equipped with my own magnet sphere (terrella) I went in search of magnetite on the foothills of Mount Ida. I was thrilled to discover some rocks that were magnetic.

The final evening in northwest Turkey was spent watching the light fade over Mount Ida as bats and hedgehogs made an appearance along with quite a lot of street dogs that were thankfully more interested in barking at each other.

On to the urban geology of Istanbul and a number of monolithic erections. In the Hippodrome, once a vast public arena for chariot races, imperial ceremonies, and public events, there are several examples of phallic architecture.

The towering red granite Obelisk of Theodosius, originally 30m tall, is an ancient Egyptian obelisk of Pharaoh Thutmose III (1479–1425 BC), first erected at Karnak to celebrate victory in battle. It was removed from Karnak and transported along the river Nile to Alexandria by the Roman emperor Constantias II in 357 and just 33 years later Theodosius I had it transported to Constantinople and erected on the spina of the Hippodrome, the relocation upheavals having reduced its height by a number of metres.

It is not known exactly when The Walled Obelisk was constructed but was probably built to mirror the Obelisk of Theodosius in the Hippodrome. Obelisks were often erected in symmetrical pairs. It was originally decorated with gilded bronze plaques (maybe to hide the fact that it wasn’t a true obelisk which should be hewn from a single piece of rock) but these were removed and melted down by Christian crusaders in 1204.

The Serpent Column is the remains of an ancient bronze column that was part of a Greek sacrificial tripod originally built in Delphi 478 BC as an offering to Apollo but relocated to Constantinople in 324.

The stone Milion was a marker from which all distances across the Roman Empire were measured. Erected by Septimius Severus upon the re-founding of Byzantium as Constantinople in 330 AD it became the starting-place for the measurement of distances for all roads leading to the cities of the Eastern Roman Empire.

The Column of the Goths, a single block of marble 18.5 metres high, erected in Gulhane Park, is the oldest monument still standing from Roman times.

The Basilica Cistern is a vast subterranean forest of columns with the 4th Century ‘Tear Column’ standing out for its unique patterns which are often thought of as tears but may actually be a stylised representation of a tree.

The Basilica Cistern is the largest of several hundred ancient cisterns that lie beneath Istanbul, built in the 6th century during the reign of Byzantine emperor Justinian I to supply the city with drinking water. The ceiling is supported by a 336 marble columns, each 9 metres high which appear to have been recycled from the ruins of older buildings and are carved out of different types of marble and granite.

Two columns reuse blocks carved with the face of Medusa. Tradition has it that the blocks are oriented sideways and inverted in order to negate the power of the Gorgon which held that anyone who looked upon her was turned to stone.

The Sacred Trust, of Islamic religious relics kept at the Topkapi Palace includes the Casing for the Black Stone, a rock set into the eastern corner of the Kaaba, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Revered by Muslims as an relic which, according to tradition, was set intact into the Kaaba’s wall by Muhammad before he became a prophet. It has had a turbulent history, being stolen, taken hostage and smashed. Today its fragments can be seen set in cement, encased in a silver frame on the side of the Kaaba, polished smooth by the hands and kisses of pilgrims. Although idolatry is forbidden in the Hebrew Bible and the Quran the use of aniconic stones, or baetyls, which are sacred stones stones venerated for their connection to the divine, without needing human-crafted images, were permitted. There has been speculation The Black Stone is a meteorite, but it has never been scientifically analysed to ascertain its physical origin. Also on display are footprints in stone (Kadem-i Şerif) attributed to the prophet Muhammad. An Ottoman scholar, Mehmed Münib Ayıntâbî (d. 1823) wrote a treatise to explain that this footprint was one of the miracles of the Prophet for otherwise how could it be possible to leave the impression of a foot on hard ground like stones. This was reiterated by a guide at the palace. There are six Kadem-i Şerif of the Prophet four of which are on stone and two of which are on brick, the most significant is the one in a gold frame believed to be left on his ascension to heaven from the Dome of the Rock.

Mechanical clocks didn’t arrive in Ottoman lands until the 15th Century, 200 years after their initial invention. Chief astronomer to Sultan Selim II, Taqi al-Din, bemoaned the new instruments as ‘the most burdensome to construct, which demanded modest workers’. The qibla compass was used to determine the direction for prayer. This Ottoman marble sundial is from 1526.

‘Were man to look up from the ground, he’d see a starry sky, were he to look down from the heavens – a wavy sea’ Tursun Beg. (15th century Ottoman historian who wrote a detailed account of Mehmed the Conqueror’s reign.)

The 1513 world map made by Turkish cartographer Pîrî Reis was discovered in the Topkapı Palace Library in 1929. Pîrî Reis created an impressively accurate depiction of the newly discovered regions of the world using a circular design based on a hypothetical centre. This map is the earliest cartographic record of Columbus’s oceanic voyages and the first to show the unique fauna of Terra Australis.

Beginning new work. Learning about the symbolism of sacred geometry in the Westminster Abbey Cosmati Pavement has inspired me to think about how I could relate ancient symbolism and contemporary iconography to think about changing relationships to fire, water, earth, air and the cosmos. Plato imagined the universe was created as a living creature in the shape of a sphere, perfect and complete in itself. Patterns of Thought author Richard Foster suggests that ‘as our minds become progressively tuned to ecological and global concerns, so the Platonic image of the world as a living creature is re-awakened from its sleep.’

In the symbolism of the Cosmati Pavement, the journey from earthly materialism to spirituality is seen as a progression from multiplicity and diversity towards unity and uniformity. The tiles show a transition from a variety of patterns through to simplified regular polygons, the archetypes of form representing a perfection that we only experience as a shadow on Earth. Random patterns at the centre of the design describe the elements in an undifferentiated state of matter, the primal chaos before the division of spirit and matter when the breath of the creator swept over the ‘turbulent waters’ or ‘silva’ bringing forth the differentiation of matter into the forms of the four elements. The medieval mind never took the world at face value and always sought to see the coexistent and equally valid layers of meaning in everything.

In medieval cosmology the separation of the elements happened before the advent of time which began with the creation of the sun, the moon and the planets as astronomical time, the timelessness of eternity is alluded to by the number 60 + 1. The end of the world was imagined as a reversal of creation. All will return into the four elements which return to the primal chaos and are reabsorbed into the divine mind and eternity.

The four elements are linked by pairs of opposing qualities: Fire is dry and hot; Air is hot and moist; Water is moist and cold; Earth is cold and dry. Each element shares a quality with two others and elements with a shared quality combine more easily. Fire is sharp, tenuous and mobile, reflected in a quick tempered choleric human temperament, it gives vision and belongs to the heavenly race of gods. Earth is blunt, weighty and immobile reflected in a heavy melancholic human temperament. Earth resides with the sense of touch and those that walk on the ground. It has stability facing to the north, south, east, west, zenith and nadir. Air is sharp, mobile and weighty reflected in a breezy optimistic human temperament. Air amplifies hearing and smell, it supports the flying creatures and is synonymous with breath and spirit. Water is mobile, blunt and weighty reflected in a dissolute easy-going human temperament. Water amplifies taste and supports the creatures that swim.

I was interested to read that in the kitchens of the Topkapi Palace (1459) in Istanbul, the four humours (blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile) were taken into account when designing the menus. Different foods were recommended depending on their qualities to restore good health for those suffering sickness which was attributed to an imbalance of the humours. The seasons were also taken into account in relation to the humours when deciding which foods to cook.

Gallery Visits

Deeper Beneath at the stunning 1500 year old Basilica Cistern Museum includes work by Vlastimil Beranek (Aqua One- Yellow – made from Bohemian Crystal), Jaroslav Prosek ( 6500 year old subfossil oak), Ali Abayoğlu (Glass Leaves and Jellyfish) and Muzaffer Tuncer (Seclusion)

Åsa Jungnelius A Verse, Written with Earth, Fire, Water and Air at Pera Museum, Istanbul. The exhibition brings together the results of time spent in the obsidian fields of Eastern Anatolia collecting natural glass formed by the rapid cooling of volcanic lava and working in the glass furnaces of Denizli along with reflections on marble steeped in Byzantine history. Archaeological finds, glass objects, materials, and handwoven cords rooted in nomadic traditions are displayed alongside photographs by Swedish photographer Peo Olsson documenting the artist’s research. There is a strange juxtaposition of the installation scaffolding set against thick carpet in the gallery.

Also at the Pera Museum was Feelings in Common: Works from the British Council Collection. The exhibition is striving to form a zone where feelings in common are shared amidst uncertainties and transformations regarding the future. Happy to see Bedwyr Williams The Starry Messenger again (image 1 + 2 – the poignant geological story of a mosaic dentist which alludes to the micro macro scales of the universe ) and Larry Achiampong’s Relic 2 (an Afrofuturist exploration of postcolonial identities, imagined futures, and ancestral memory) along with a small work from Raqib Shaw from his Garden of Earthly Delights series amongst other works.

The VoiceLine by composer and sound artist Nick Ryan installed in the atmospheric Deadhouse, Somerset House. 39 precisely aligned speakers, creating an evolving pathway of sound reflecting the histories of radio and listening that began on the Strand more than a century ago.

An exhibition by KitMapper, an artist led production company, Along More Latent Lines at Somerset House to showcase new and recent works of the team and creatives based here including the interactive and immersive Genetic Moo: Magic by Genetic Moo.

Jane and Louise Wilson Performance of Entrapment at The London Mithraeum Bloomberg Space featuring 2,000 year old oak stakes that inspired imagery looking at structure and ritual. The works investigates parallels between the sacred sites of Mithras and Japan’s Ise Jingu Shrine.

Treen (of a tree) was a collaborative event between Liz Botterill, Sevenoaks museum curator and the Kaleidoscope Gallery co-curators Rosalind Barker and Sue Evans, with the artists of Sevenoaks Visual Arts Forum. The artists were invited to respond to items in Sevenoaks Museum that are made of wood. Participating artists: Colin Anderson, Carole Aston, Jocelyn Bailey, Rosalind Barker, Susanne Beard, Sarah Cliff, Christina Crews, Louisa Crispin, Margaret Devitt, Louisa Donovan, Duncan Dwinell, Sally Eldars, Sue Evans, Deborah Farquarson, Victoria Granville, Kate Grimes, Amanda Hopkins, Marilyn Kyle, Keith Lovegrove, Venetia Nevill, Clare Revolta, Franny Swann and Irene Vaughan. Venetia Nevill worked outside the remit to create ‘Memories of a tree’ to honour a plantation of spruce trees that have been felled, because they were infected by the spruce beetle. Her process of wrapping a cloth around a tree, and rubbing the burnt soil, ash and charcoal into it, memorialises and commemorates the trees. Over a few months the cloth absorbed the sunlight, birdsong and passing of time, allowing the elements to leave their mark, and create a cloak of protection. The cloth is exhibited along with burnt remains of trees.

Reading

North Pole, South Pole: The Epic Quest to Solve the Great Mystery of Earth’s Magnetism by Gillian Turner. A very readable account of all the philosophers, explorers and scientists fascinated by the origin of Earth’s magnetism, from the earliest speculations of lodestone mountains, magnetic polar stars to seismology and deep ocean core sampling revealing the inner working of the planet.

Turning to Stone by Marcia Bjornerud. This book is the antithesis of the idiom ‘as cold as a stone’. It is a passionate and candid account of relationships between humans and rocks. Human to human, human to rock, rock to human and rock to rock. Along the way we learn a lot about geology and the human condition.

Tags Ali Abayoğlu, art, Åsa Jungnelius, Bedwyr Williams, Cosmati pavement, cosmology, elements, footsteps, Genetic Moo, Gillian Turner, Istanbul, Jane and Louise Wilson, Jaroslav Prosek, Kazdağı, KitMapper, Larry Achiampong, Magnes, Magnesia, magnet, magnetite, Marcia Bjornerud, Medusa, Mount Ida, Muzaffer Tuncer, Natural History, Nick Ryan, obelisk, oxygen, platonic solids, Pliny, Raqib Shaw, technology, terrella, Topkapi Palace, travel, Turkey, urban geology, Venetia Nevill, Vlastimil Beranek, Zeytinli

Categories Uncategorized

Carbon

September 7, 2025 //

Carbon, Carbon Everywhere opened at Hypha HQ co-curated by Maria Hinel & Indira Dyussebayeva-Ziyabek with exhibiting artists Emii Alrai, Kate Daudy, Konstantin Novoselov, Susan Eyre, Ania Mokrzycka, Simon Faithfull, Nissa Nishikawa, Mariele Neudecker, Anousha Payne, Aimée Parrott, Lucia Pizzani, Lizi Sanchez, Meng Zhou.

The title of the exhibition is taken from the chapter Carbon in the book The Periodic Table by the writer and chemist Primo Levi. Levi traces a journey of a single atom of carbon across distinct states and beings, from resting in a bed of limestone for hundreds of millions of years, to entering the world of ‘things that change’ – swiftly shifting from the atmosphere to the lungs of a falcon, to the sea, to the trunk of a cedar, and eventually entering the writer’s own body from a glass of milk on his desk. Resolutely specific yet universal, Levi’s story highlights the singularity of carbon as an element that inherently connects all things through its relentless transformation. It fossilises, mutates, preserves, pollutes and nourishes. From its ancient geological formations to its current atmospheric volatility, carbon is never still, shifting between forms and contexts in an ongoing process of exchange.

I am very happy to be exhibiting my video Cosmic Chiasmus: crossing the universe alongside the work of the other amazing artists.

Not only is all life physically permeated by cosmic rays with the potential for nuclei collisions but some cascading particles smash into atoms of nitrogen to create carbon-14 which combines with oxygen in the atmosphere to create radioactive carbon-dioxide. Carbon-14 enters the food cycle via photosynthesis as plants absorb it from the atmosphere. It is constantly renewed in all living organisms. On death, the amount of carbon-14 in the tissues begins to decay at a known rate which can be measured to determine the time of death. Cosmic ray activity therefore allows us to perform carbon dating techniques offering insights into Earth’s past climate and magnetic field, solar activity, and changes in the carbon cycle, helping us to understand historical patterns and establish timelines for ancient human history. Understanding the past can help us plan for the future.

Installation shot: Cosmic Chiasmus: crossing the universe 2021, video 05:25 min

Gallery Visits

I loved the textures of the sandy cementy surface of the mixed media painting by Antoni Tàpies in Point and Counterpoint at Centro Botin, Santander.

ENREDOS (entanglements) II at Centro Botin, Santander. Nuno da Luz amplifies the frequencies of the waves and the winds felt in the Bay of Santander, interweaving them with their oscillations of the building itself. The sound installations generate shared listening spaces, converting the environmental data of the Santander coast into vibrations and amplifying the building’s own vibrations, extending and intensifying their intrinsic energies.

The exhibition also includes works by Javier Arce: a series of oil paintings titled On What is Nearby and the sculpture Cambium – cast from the last ring of a tree stump – this is the most recent ring under the bark where new wood cells are formed as the tree grows.

Katinka Bock: A striking installation Feuilles de temperatures which incorporates weather patinated copper sheets rescued from the dome of Anzeiger-Hochhaus in Hannover a legendary site of editorial histories, alongside Some and any, fleeting, an installation of large digital prints set with tiny bronze, ceramic and copper sculptures.

The video Core, a collaboration between sculptor June Crespo and cinematographer Maddi Barber which documents the different states through which the sculptor’s material passes: rock, dust, liquid, and solid. Connecting the processes of hands that touch and manipulate the cement sculptures, and the rock extraction and transformation process in a quarry.

Tacita Dean The Wet Prayer in reference to the final plea of Saint Paul as he was shipwrecked off the coast of Malta. In this exhibition the ephemeral chalk of Dean’s ocean waves resonate with the sound waves recorded from the bay outside and played back within the gallery space.

Great curation by Susanna Greeves of engaging works in Alien Shores at White Cube Bermondsey. In every depiction of landscape is a reflection of the values and beliefs of the society that created it. Landscape is not the world, but the world through human eyes.

Exhibiting artists included: Michael Armitage A kind of belief, oil on Lubugo bark cloth.

Noémie Goudal Tropiques IV, inkjet print and the mesmerizing collapse of dissolving landscapes in Supra Strata, HD video as layer after layer warps, stetches, tears and falls until there is nothing.

Sky Hopinka shapeshifting video Mnemonics of Shape and Reason

Marguerite Humeau Skero ( the dormant), embellished silk double organza, cast rubber, sediments, pigments, handblown glass, milled walnut, polyurethane foam, epoxy resin and stainless steel paired with Darren Almond’s haunting Fullmoon@Baltic Coastline, latex print.

Hung Fai, optically intriguing The Six Principles of Chinese Painting: Transmission XXII (with Hung Hoi), ink and colour on paper.

Eva Jospin, Forêt, cardboard and wood.

Anselm Kiefer Brigach und Breg bringen die Donau zu Weg, three panels emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf and sediment of electrolysis on canvas.

Ken Gun Min Everything We Can Imagine As Light Baroque pearl, crystal, assorted gemstones, vintage beads, Korean pigment, silk embroidery, thread, found fabrics and oil paint on canvas. I love exuberance of his painting and the title made me think of the epic Anthony Doerr book All The Light We Cannot See and the beautiful film All We Imagine As Light written and directed by Payal Kapadia both of which I found deeply moving.

Isamu Noguchi Mountains Forming hot dipped galvanised steel.

Bagus Pandega and Kei Imazu, Artificial Green by Nature Green 4.1, Painting and erasing machine, water based paint on linen canvas, modular synthesiser, LED screen, PC and jelly palm tree. This was not in action when I visited.

The delicate detailed forests on the cusp of erasure of Tomás Sánchez

Emma Webster mega painting Borrow Every Forest which has echoes of Noemi Goudall’s video in it’s staged nod to artifice.

Robert Zehnder Hip Bone, oil on canvas on panel.

Out and About

Not to forget that as backdrop to everything that occurs at the moment is the horrific genocide being perpetrated in Gaza. It seems impossible that such cruelty can happen, is still happening and the powers that could stop it do nothing. Santander beach protest for a free Palestine that I was able to walk alongside.

Contemplating geological time, rock gazing along the Santander coast.

This sci-fi looking experimental lifeboat was designed by Spanish explorer Vital Alsar as part of his project El Hombre y la Mar. It has a capacity for 12 castaways and was towed across the Atlantic from Mexico to Santander in 1978, the culmination of his expedition to emulate the one undertaken in 1542 by Francisco de Orellana from Ecuador on foot across the Andes to navigate the length of the Amazon to the ocean. Through his expeditions, including the longest crossing of the Pacific Ocean by raft, Alsar wanted to prove that by respect for, and harmony with nature, humans can cross oceans, feed themselves and live sustainably.

Inspiral London; Re/Walk Festival: Rivers, Reservoirs, Ice and Sea. The colours and layers of Walthamstow revealed by artist Gail Dickerson and geologist Ruth Siddall both members of London Geodiversity a group concerned with the natural and human aspects of landscape, focused on the rocks, sediments, soils, the landscape topography and the processes that act on the landscape. We were not only enlightened on the deep time history of this urban landscape as we stood and imagined when glaciers reached as far as Epping and woolly mammoths wandered the land here but were instructed on how to make shimmering ink from galls, how to make charcoal in a bonfire and use earth’s rich pigments to paint with. Galls form when an organism (like an insect) penetrates or irritates plant tissue, triggering the plant to grow and enclose the organism.

Something I recently found out, amid the hype of the new movie, was that the Fantastic Four super hero characters got their powers from exposure to cosmic rays on an ill fated/serendipitous (depending on how you look at it) space mission. The original story was from 1961, the year Yuri Gagarin was the first human to orbit in space. Cosmic rays are a real danger to astronauts as these high energy radioactive particles can cause cell damage. Astronauts also experience directs hits on the retina from cosmic rays which they see as tiny flashes of light but this wouldn’t have been knowledge in 1961.

Reading

Patterns of Thought: The hidden meaning of the great pavement of Westminster Abbey by Richard Foster. The book offers a thorough investigation into of what is known as the Cosmati Pavement; a unique work laid down in 1268 by order of Henry III who commissioned workmen from Rome, led by Odoricus, who were skilled in a type of inlaid stone decoration known as Cosmati work.

The provenance of the stones and the history of the pavement is interesting but the most compelling aspect of the pavement is its intriguing inscription in Latin which promises the reader disclosure of the end of time. It translates as

Four years before this Year of Our Lord 1272,                                                                                             King Henry III, the Court of Rome, Odoricus and the Abbot                                                                            set in place these porphyry stones.                                                                                                                   If the reader wittingly reflects upon all that is laid down,                                                                               he will discover here the measure of the primum mobile:                                                                                              the hedge stands for three years,                                                                                                                             add in turn dogs, and horses and men,                                                                                                       stags and ravens, eagles, huge sea monsters, the world:                                                                             each that follows triples the years of the one before.                                                                                    Here is the perfectly rounded sphere which reveals                                                                                                    the eternal pattern of the universe.

The fateful day expressed in terms of the multiplied life-spans of various creatures apparently arrives at the sum of 19,683. The book offers fascinating insight into the beliefs of medieval cosmology, Christian philosophy and sacred geometry that together formed the thoughts that were meticulously laid down in stone.

Tags Anselm Kiefer, Antoni Tàpies, art, Bagus Pandega and Kei Imazu, books, carbon, carbon dating, carbon-14, Cosmati pavement, Cosmic Chiasmus, cosmic rays, Darren Almond, Emma Webster, Eva Jospin, Fantastic Four, Gail Dickerson, gall, gallery, Gaza, geology, Hung Fai, Hypha HQ, Indira Dyussebayeva-Ziyabek, Isamu Noguchi, Javier Arce, Katinka Bock, Ken Gun Min, Marguerite Humeau, Maria Hinel, Michael Armitage, Noémie Goudal, Nuno da Luz, Palestine, Robert Zehnder, Ruth Siddall, Santander, Sky Hopinka, Tacita Dean, Tomás Sánchez, travel, video, Vital Alsar

Categories Uncategorized

below and beyond

August 11, 2025 //

Thrilled to be invited to exhibit in Carbon, Carbon Everywhere at Hypha HQ co-curated by Indira Dyussebayeva-Ziyabek and Maria Hinel including artists Emii Alrai, Kate Daudy & Konstantin Novoselov, Simon Faithfull, Ania Mokrzycka, Nissa Nishikawa, Mariele Neudecker, Anousha Payne, Aimée Parrott, Lucia Pizzani, Lizi Sanchez, and Meng Zhou.

Integral to the constitution of our bodies, soil, air and some rocks, carbon is a highly bonding element that incessantly transmutes from state to state, each particle challenging the boundaries between life and non-life. Bringing together works by twelve international artists, Carbon, Carbon Everywhere explores the shifting states of carbon, an element that threads through organic and inorganic matter, linking bodies, environments, and temporal scales.

I have updated my website with documentation on the video installation Lithos Panoptes recently shown at Hypha HQ in The Geological Unconscious which can be viewed here. Referencing a many-eyed giant of Greek mythology, Argos Panoptes (always eyes still awake), the work considers the perpetual vigilance of rock as record keeper and witness.

Lithos Panoptes, optical lenses, wood, steel, two-way projection; Sculpture H172 x W170 x D50 cm, Rear projection screen H180 x W180 cm.

Great to be mentioned in an Art Newspaper article.

Magnetic News

Interesting to hear about new magnetic materials being developed that will hopefully have a less harmful ecological impact and offer more technological efficiency. The magnetic materials that are so heavily relied upon for computer memory and microelectronic devices include rare and toxic heavy elements whose energy-intensive production creates significant global carbon emissions. Previously, two primary types of magnetism had been identified, ferromagnetic (regular magnetism that we are familiar with) and antiferromagnetic (which are internally magnetic, but their opposing spin orientations make them appear non-magnetic externally). A third form known as altermagnetism has recently been confirmed with around 200 altermagnetic materials already being identified. These materials have a distinct magnetic order where tiny magnetic fields created by electrons are in anti-parallel alignment within a rotation of the host crystal structure leading to unique electronic properties. Altermagnetic materials have the potential for technological advancements offering huge increases in speed and efficiency especially in spintronics, an advanced technology that leverages both the charge and spin of electrons to store and process information.

A permanent magnet, MagNex that does not use the rare earth elements which have sustainability and supply chain issues, was developed in just three months with the help of AI analysing thousands of potential alloys. ‍‍ “This could have a significant future impact on our net-zero ambitions, through renewable energy and low-carbon transport, by removing the need for rare earth elements in high-performance permanent magnets.”

Recently launched, NASA’s TRACERS mission satellites fly in low Earth orbit through the polar cusps, funnel-shaped holes in the magnetic field where solar activity causes magnetic field lines to disconnect and reconnect creating disruption in the magnetosphere. By strategic placing of the twin TRACERS spacecraft in Sun-synchronous orbit, so that they always pass through the Earth’s dayside, thousands of dayside reconnection events can be observed and compared between spacecraft to see how quickly the process changes and evolves. Better understanding magnetic reconnection and its effects in Earth’s atmosphere will help prepare for impacts of solar activity on Earth. The magnetosphere protects Earth from the constant bombardment of solar particles from the Sun, but when magnetic field lines are disrupted by the solar wind, particles rain down into Earth’s atmosphere not only causing beautiful phenomena, like the aurora, but also impacting infrastructure, like satellites and GPS systems.

‍

Out and About

I have been lucky to visit exhibitions in Finland and Norfolk to see works that interrogate human impact on the environment and other living beings that share our planet.

Helsinki Biennial 2025 Shelter: Below and Beyond, Becoming and Belonging brings together 37 artists and collectives on Vallisaari Island (which has been off-limits for human habitation for decades), in Esplanade Park, and at HAM (Helsinki Art Museum). It explores the significance of shelter and turns the gaze towards non-human nature. In the works, the focus shifts from humans to animals, water, plants, insects, minerals, and other living beings and their role as contributors to our planet’s wellbeing.

Artists with work installed in the Esplanade Park included Katie Holten (inventing a forest alphabet) and Guiseppe Penone (inseparable connections between humans and nature).

Artists at HAM (Helsinki Art Museum) included Jenni Laiti & Carl-Johan Utsi (precarity of survival), Regina de Miguel (technofossils), Aluaiy Kaumakan (displaced community), Otobong Nkanga (ownership of resources), Ingela Ihrman (invasive species), Locus/Thale Blix Fastvold & Tanja Thorjussen (eelgrass conservation), Sissel M Bergh (Sami cosmology), Edgar Calel (more than human agencies).

Artists with work installed around the beautiful Vallisaari Island included Hans Rosenström (petrified wood soundscape), Tue Greenfort (species evolution), Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas (amplifying non-human voices), Pia Sirén (human modified environments), LOCUS / Thale Blix Fastvold & Tanja Thorjussen (water health), Tania Candiani (hidden networks of the forest), Sara Bjarland (discarded inflatables), Kati Roover (humans and whales), Juan Zamora (bioluminescence), Band of Weeds (vegetal distress), Kristiina Koskentola (friendship of crows), Tamara Henderson (hidden realm of worms), Ernesto Neto (shapeshifting), Theresa Traore Dahlberg (invisible frequencies), Ana Teresa Barboza (plant narratives), Carola Grahn (colonialism legacy on estrangement from nature), nabbteeri (parasitism), Olafur Eliasson (more than human ways of seeing).

Excellent Monira Al Qadiri exhibition Deep Fate at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki. Addressing the dichotomy of enjoying contemporary life made possible by oil during the accelerating climate crisis. Deep Fate, refers to the origins of oil deep in the earth and also to the way that dependence on oil and breaking that dependence are a matter of life and death for humankind. Al Qadiri grew up next door to oil refineries in Kuwait and experienced the Gulf War as a child. This personal experience is drawn upon in the haunting video Crude Eye which attempts to reconcile childhood memories of the oil refinery as a romantic glowing metropolis with its true nature as a site of environmental destruction. The demise of the local pearl-diving industry, a source of income superseded by the oil boom, is referenced by sculptures echoing the molecular structures of the chemicals used in oil drilling with iridescent rainbow colours that are reminiscent of oil and the shimmering surface of pearls.

Also at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma was Rock, Paper, Scissors an anthology of diverse materials in contemporary art. Claes Oldenburg’s giant Extinguished Match which plays with scale brought to mind the video by David Hochgatterer Streichhölzer (Matches) where matches appear to spontaneously combust shown in the Carbon: Under Pressure exhibition recent tour to Glasgow ARC.

Materials celebrated through this exhibition included neural pathways stimulation of the visual system by pressure on the eyelids to see phosphenes, glittery thick folds of acrylic on canvas, leaded glass breakages, ephemeral copper wire net, faux marble that is actually hair on the barbers concrete floor.

With my head still full of the geological (unconscious) it was great to see the works of Alicja Kwade, Big Be-Hide (parallel universes – natural rock and a metallic copy either side of a two-way mirror) and Pars pro Toto (a part for the whole – stone planet like spheres) from the 2021 Biennial now installed in Helsinki’s Kalasatama district.

Another ‘geological’ delight was the unexpected appearance of stalactite’s forming in the tunnels of the military sea fortress built in the 1700’s on the island of Suomenlinna, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

I loved the amazing hive like wood floor at Suomenlinna boatyard. Every tree carries a memory of the past, recording the weather and conditions of each season. Dendrochronologists can work out exactly when a tree was cut down which is very helpful in underwater archaeology. Around Suomenlinna there are shipwrecks beneath the sea with no identifying features except their wooden timbers which incredibly hold clues to when and where the trees used were felled. Marine archaeologists, shipbuilders and forest scientists are working together to discover the stories behind the lost ships.

Helsinki is big on amazing libraries. The National Library of Finland is stunning and bursting with tantalizing books to explore, and the new Helsinki Central Library Oodi takes your breath away in its scale and sweeping curves.

Sadly Helsinki Observatory has long since stopped functioning as a place for active astronomical research (2009) and is now a museum. It was disappointing that the electronic cloud chamber they possess wasn’t switched on but there were some interesting instruments to wonder about in the meridian room.

Each day the time signal bag was hoisted to the top of a mast on the roof of the observatory just before noon and dropped down exactly at noon. The correct time having been determined by an astronomer observing the stars at night. This event could be seen from Helsinki Central Railway Station where the station clock was then synchronised. This method of time keeping for Helsinki residents was in use until the 1920’s.

The future of our oceans is explored in the Sainsbury Centre’s Can The Seas Survive Us?

The sea has often been viewed as a mysterious ‘other’, with its expansive surface and seemingly infinite depths dominating marine imagery in the history of Western art. Artworks in this exhibition explore the ways the oceans have been domesticated, reimagined on a bodily scale and brought inside to be tamed, contained or better understood. Sea Inside turns our oceanic gaze towards the sea’s more intimate spaces – whether physical, psychological or imaginary – and dives into shared watery origins, Indigenous ways of life and the items we remove from the sea to display on land.

A World of Water takes the North Sea and the historical relationship between Norfolk and the Netherlands as its starting point to look at the human impact on the sea. It was wonderful to see the original book Mundus Subterraneous from 1664 by Athanasius Kirschner whose geological illustrations and speculations I have been fascinated by. Olafur Eliasson’s suspended Shore Compass uses driftwood to reflect on navigation of an uncertain world. Some great maps in this exhibition including the intriguing map of sandbanks off the coast around Great Yarmouth. I have enjoyed following Julian Charriere’s visually dramatic work on Instagram so it was good to see these images scaled up. Andrew Watkinson’s montage based on research from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change about coastal erosion in Norfolk swerves from resignation to resistance, hope to despair and took me back to my BA dissertation (The Communication Of Ecological Concerns Through Contemporary Artistic Practice, 2007) writing about climate change warnings coming from the Tyndall Centre and the frustration of researchers about distorted media coverage that made it hard for the public to understand the facts. Suffolk too has lost a lot of land to the sea since I was a child there. Although dreams of tidal waves are common anxiety dreams I believe mine were also influenced by overheard stories of the North Sea flood of 1953 when a storm surge coincided with a high spring tide, which my parents and local villagers remembered vividly, it was the worst flood of the 20th century in England and Scotland and many lives were lost. Maggi Hambling’s sublime Wall of Water holds frozen the terrifying waves that may threaten us while Cian Dayrit’s Dam Nation examines the impact to communities and ecosystems when water is held back or re-routed.

Darwin in Paradise Camp by Japanese-Sāmoan artist Yuki Kihara calls out that ” a reconsideration of what it means to be human requires a re-evaluation of the origin of the species.”

Sea Inside turns our oceanic gaze towards the sea’s more intimate spaces – whether physical, psychological or imaginary including work by Marcus Coates (attempts to create the call of the humpback whale in a bathtub), Kasia Molga (How to make an Ocean – the artist’s salt tears fill miniature glass capsules where algae is cultivated), Gabriella Hirst (ethereal images on hand etched fibreglass in a slatted structure that echoes the baleen inside a whale’s mouth).

At London galleries I saw work about tuning in to invisible forces, the importance of how we treat our fellow humans (dead or alive) and an assessment of the influence of past and present technology on hope for the future.

Islington Gallery Weekend is a great idea, just the heat while out walking that weekend meant I didn’t make it to all the galleries participating.

The Observatory at Bobinska Brownlee New River, presented abstract and textural works by Claudio del Sole, an artist and amateur astronomer who co-founded the ‘Astralist’ movement in 1959 inspired by the dawn of the space age. These cosmic inspired works are shown alongside those made in response to the Astralist manifesto by contemporary artists James Brooks, Robert Good and D J Roberts. Cocktails and an incredible performance on the piano of unique work by composer Edward Henderson were also part of the afternoon.

Poignant work from Harriet Mena Hill in Curtains at PostROOM Gallery. Fragments collected from demolition of the Aylesbury Estate in South East London are meticulously painted with details of the buildings that once were home to a community. An accompanying film gives voice to those who enjoyed life here before lack of maintenance and social care slowly stripped away the heart and soul.

Fascinating listening to Tracy Hill speak about her work in Natural Frequencies at White Conduit Projects which explores ways of being sensitive to invisible energies that move through us and our landscapes. Her experience of working with a water diviner feeds into her intuitive drawing processes and cut paper works.

I was drawn to visit Gala Porras-Kim The categorical bind at Sprüth Magers to see these images which reminded me of the large hadron collider but made from marble. They are actually an examination of the conservation of marble tiled floors in Italy.

I remembered I had seen her work before at Gasworks and found it really interesting. In this piece she attempts to commune with the dead whose remains have ended up in a museum collection, possibly not where the living person had expected or would want.

Gala Porras-Kim

All Earth energy sources are known to come from the Sun

Brass, sunlight

Most of the works were coloured pencil drawings of museum collections, giving agency to objects and questioning categorisation – this one of the poor mole amulet made me think of my mole killer brother who suffers from arthritis.

It is fascinating to think about how humans experience sound and consider frequencies occurring outside the human spectrum of sensitivity that other animals may be able to hear. Also to think about sound as vibrating bodily rather than auditory sensation. Barbican Feel the Sound requires a willingness for interactivity to experience most of the exhibits. The instructions weren’t always clear and so it was at times a bit of a frustrating journey through the space.

Tags Aimée Parrott, Alicja Kwade, altermagnetism, Ania Mokrzycka, Anousha Payne, art, Athanasius Kirschner, Barbican, carbon, Cian Dayrit, Claes Oldenburg, Claudio del Sole, D J Roberts, David Hochgatterer, Emii Alrai, Gabriella Hirst, Gala Porras-Kim, Greek mythology, Guiseppe Penone, Harriet Mena Hill, Helsinki, Hypha HQ, Indira Dyussebayeva-Ziyabek, Islington Gallery Weekend, Julian Charriere, Kasia Molga, Kate Daudy, Lithos Panoptes, Lizi Sanchez, Lucia Pizzani, Maggi Hambling, magnetic, Marcus Coates, Maria Hinel, Mariele Neudecker, Meng Zhou, Monira Al Qadiri, Nissa Nishikawa, Olafur Eliasson, Otobong Nkanga, Robert Good, sculpture, Simon Faithfull, Suomenlinna, Tania Candiani, tracers, Tracy Hill, travel, Tue Greenfort, video, Yuki Kihara

Categories Uncategorized

mineral vision

July 5, 2025 //

The Geological Unconscious had a wonderful six week run at Hypha HQ, Euston. Responding to Jason Groves’ inquiry into the mineral imaginary in his eponymous book, as well as the ‘Writing of Stones’ as proposed by writer and mineral collector Roger Caillois, the exhibition exposes the complex entanglements between the organic and the inorganic; the human and the lithic.

Very happy to receive lots of positive feedback for my video installation Lithos Panoptes. People were very engaged with how the work reveals itself in stages, from the kaleidoscopic imagery displaying on the two way suspended screen to discovering the board of distorting lenses behind the screen and finally stepping back to see the original film from the human perspective before it is transformed by the lenses.

Referencing a many-eyed giant of Greek mythology, Argos Panoptes (always eyes still awake), the work considers the perpetual vigilance of rock as record keeper and witness. Video of human activity projected through distorting optical lenses transforms the anthropocentric position to imagine the perspective of the rock.

The pattern of lenses is informed by the molecular structure of magnetite, a mineral found in magma and metamorphic rock in Earth’s crust as well as in meteorites and the cells of organisms.

Through actual and metaphoric lenses, the relationship between the organic and non-organic is explored.

_{Lithos Panoptes 2025, Optical lenses, wood, steel, projector. Video 09:27 min Sculpture: H172 × W170 × D50 cm, Rear projection screen: H180 × W180 cm.}

_{Photography by Benjamin Deakin}

Mined magnetite is used in industrial and mechanical processes and its use in combustion engines and vehicle braking systems is releasing nanoscale pollutant particles into the air which are finding their way into human brain cells, vastly overwhelming the innate magnetite present, causing concerns linked to the development of degenerative brain diseases.

As well as referencing an ever watchful, many-eyed giant of Greek mythology, Lithos Panoptes also considers the numerous eyes (ocelli) of the chiton (a species of mollusc) whose rock crystal lenses have evolved over many millions of years to keep watch along rocky coastlines across the globe.

The only creature with eye lenses made of mineral and not protein, the chiton is also unique in having rows of teeth primed with magnetite which allow chomping on the hard rock surfaces it clings to. Some chiton’s teeth also contain the recently discovered mineral santabarbaraite, named after the mining district Santa Barbara in Italy where it was found – it is one of the few minerals named after a woman.

I was surprised to discover that the benedictions of Saint Barbara are still sought today, with shrines installed at tunnel entrances at Crossrail and even at CERN, the epicentre of scientific rigour. Before the boring machines were set in motion, services seeking her blessings were performed by local priests, with some even being winched down excavation shafts to carry out their duties.

Saint Barbara, who is associated with sudden death from fire, lightning and explosions, including military armaments, was adopted as patron saint of miners and tunnellers when the use of explosives in mining escalated during the 1600’s.

As the statues of Saint Barbara installed at these tunnel entrances are now buried, I have substituted images of my mother Barbara, coincidently born within hours of this Saint’s Day, in my video installation Lithos Panoptes.

Tucked into a dark recess of the gallery, Belly of a Rock suggests an imagined place of chemical conversations at the intersection of the organic and inorganic. A hybrid between rock, mollusc and technology this video sculpture responds to an early lifeform’s emerging self-awareness, desire to communicate and urge to create as described by Italo Calvino in his story ‘The Spiral’. We don’t always know what we are creating.

Thrilled to show these works alongside Julie F Hill @juliefhill, Rona Lee @ronaleeartist, Charlie Franklin @charlie__franklin and Deborah Tchoudjinoff @deboraht_ff

Julie F Hill’s sculptural print installation Parent Body uses scanning electron microscope imagery of samples recently returned from asteroid Bennu. The cave-like entrance, provides an embodied experience of the data and invites intimate contemplation of expanded scales. The ambiguous rock-like yet flowing forms echo the words of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen ‘stone is fluid when viewed within its proper duration’. Hill’s miniature work Return, considers the chemical and molecular cross exchanges between earth and space and in a gesture of reverse sample return (scientific missions and human extractive processes both take), a bead of Iridium is returned to the belly of asteroid Itokawa. Her small-scale embroidery work Water and Night, is based on observational studies of moonlight on water, continuing her explorations of water as the eye of landscape as proposed by Gaston Bachelard.

_{Julie F Hill, Parent Body, physically manipulated soy-ink print on tissue, chalk and clay pigments, chrome metal, water, clamp, funnel. c. W3 × H2.2 × D2.5m. 2025. Return, 3d print of asteroid Itokawa cast in plaster-of-paris, Iridium, 20 ×11× 8mm. 2024. Water and Night, silver metalized embroidery thread, 5.3 ×11 cm. 2025}

_{Photography Julie F Hill (1+3) Benjamin Deakin (2)}

Deborah Tchoudjinoff’s moving image installation work The City of Gold (with sound in collaboration with Joe Farley) considers vast, beyond human, geological timescales when continents have once again become as one. Starting as a short fiction text, Deborah began to form an imagined world of cities in a future Amasia. The fictional cities are named after minerals that are heavily sought – rare earths, copper, uranium, gold, and coal – hinting at a narrative of an Earth depleted of the resources we rely on. The City of Gold is one of the five imagined cities. In a world where these natural resources are no longer, she questions what it would look like and who would be the inhabitants.

_{Deborah Tchoudjinoff, The City of Gold, video with sound, sculptural installation, 2m × 4m × 2m. 2025.}

_{Photography B J Deakin (1) Julie F Hill (3)}

For Litho/Domous Rona Lee has chosen to work with book plates originating in the post-war period of the ‘great acceleration’ – a time in which population numbers, use of natural resources, popular consumerism, technological dependency and environmental degeneration burgeoned. Unified in their varying representations of the geologic but broking no contradiction between their celebration of extractive processes such as tourism and industrialisation and idealisation of the ‘wild’, the images selected by Lee conjure a pre-fall world in which imaginaries of lithic instability are firmly suppressed.

Two handfuls of silt (the residue of scientific samples collected at a depth of 4,000 meters), squeezed into the artist’s hands, fired and then gilded, form Rona Lee’s I want, I want, I want (2012), the title of which references William Blake’s engraving of the same name, wryly conjures the possibility of reaching down into the ocean’s depth, as though into a rock pool, while simultaneously cautioning against the folly and voracity of such ambitions.

_{Rona Lee, Litho/Domous, light panels, bookplates. 2025. I want, I want, I want, fired and chromed handfuls of sediment, 2012.}

_{Photography B J Deakin}

The sculptures presented by Charlie Franklin, Landform and FRAGS, are lumpy, solid looking forms that speak of geological debris or ruins. All three pieces were soaked in the waters of the North Sea, on the easterly edge of the UK. This process allowed the natural elements to determine their individual patination or colouring, along with indentations and scuffs, where materials have been worn away by salt and stone. Cave Drawings (Aladdin’s Cave, Series of Grottos, Marble Curtain, Fairy Grotto, and Solomon’s Temple) are a series of five found postcards depicting the caves at Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, UK which have been hand coloured by the artist. Franklin is interested in how the addition of colour can provoke a personality or aura within each cave interior, allowing for grand experiments to be realised on an intimate scale.

_{Charlie Franklin, Landform, Cardboard, found fabric, gaffer tape, gouache, scrim, plaster, adhesive, acrylic paint, copper leaf, sea water residue, 87 × 26 × 30cm. 2025. Cave Drawings, felt tip on found postcards, 14 × 9cm. 2025. FRAGS, cardboard, rope, gaffer tape, scrim, oil paint, aluminium leaf, plaster, adhesive, acrylic paint, copper leaf, seawater residue, work in two parts, 29 × 22 × 28cm / 12 × 29 × 23cm. 2025.}

_{Photography B J Deakin, Julie F Hill}

A highlight of our events was an Urban Geology Walk led by geologist Ruth Siddall.

“The gravel pit, like other mining holes, is the reverse image of the cityscape it creates — extraction in the aid of erection.” Lucy Lippard

Ruth lead a group walk to explore the geology of the local built environment around Regent’s Place and Fitzrovia. Her knowledge of geology is astounding and her passion for stone infectious. Everyone came away incredulous, having their eyes opened to the deep time history of the rocks that build our city. The deep, black, Archaean dolerite from Mashonaland in Zimbabwe that Ruth points to is 2.2 billion years old. The large block of polished stone shaped like a giant pebble, itself crammed with pebbles of other rocks, is a sculpture by John Aiken, Monolith & Shadow. A patchwork of Jurassic limestone from southern Spain is crowded with the spire-shaped fossil shells of the gastropod Nerinea, stained red and yellow with ochres.

After the walk Ruth joined us for a tour of the gallery – it was fantastic to hear her insight and corroboration on some of the research that fed into the artworks.

I offered Lithomancy drop-in sessions on Friday afternoons as part of a programme of events for The Geological Unconscious. Visitors were invited to throw gemstones with specially assigned characteristics onto a wooden board divided into geologically themed sections. They are then given personal interpretations based on the position of the cast stones by drawing from the esoteric ritual of lithomancy which seeks to divine the future from the reading of stones.

This performative experience proposes insights into the power and allure of stones emanating from the symbolic meanings attributed to them and exposes the entangled relations between the human and the geologic found in our language and desire to align the human condition with the lithic.

We had many interesting visitors to The Geological Unconscious and have made some wonderful new contacts. Not least among these was meeting Melanie Wheeler who has recently completed a residency in the UCL Geology Department where she worked with the technician to re-curate the rock room. Julie and I were lucky to be taken on a tour of the newly curated collection and receive gifts. So excited to have a beautiful sample of magnetite.

In ancient Greek, magnetite was known as “magnes lithos,” meaning “stone from Magnesia” – the region in Thessaly, Greece, where magnetite was first discovered, supposedly by a shepherd who noticed the nails in his boots were sticking to the rock under his feet.

As an additional daily drop in activity during The Geological Unconscious we offered cheong tasting. Chef Moonhyung Lee explored human-mineral entanglements through digestion using stones to create cheong (Korean fermented syrup). The use of weighing stones helps create the environment for preservation, a process which amplifies the bioavailability of minerals in food. Moonhyung Lee is a food designer with a background in graphics. She is currently based in London and works at zero waste restaurant Silo.

It was great to have so many people join us for our Closing Event artist talks and the launch of the exhibition publication with preface by Jason Groves and short essay by Ruth Siddall.

We also had the microscope set up at the closing event to look at some crystal growth in solutions prepared by Julie who works extensively with crystals.

I had tried some ‘Vitamin C’ crystal growing microscopy experiments at home. These images use a polarising filter under the microscope to reveal the vibrant colours. Next step will be to set up a timelapse of the crystals growing.

Summer Solstice 2025. The shortest night of the longest day brought an awful darkness. Collected the last two solargraphs I had installed at the Hogsmill Nature Reserve. These have been collecting light from the sun for a whole year, recording every sunrise and sunset. May the light shine through.

I was delighted that my video Cosmic Chiasmus: crossing the universe was included in CARBON: Under Pressure, at the Mazumdar-Shaw Advanced Research Centre as part of Glasgow Science Festival 2025, in a special exhibition partnership with Science Gallery Bengaluru.

The video offers a glimpse into a subatomic world where cosmic rays travel from distant galaxies to collide and silently interact with atoms and technology on Earth. Alongside the screening of the video I was also invited to give an artist talk and cloud chamber demonstration. It was great to share the wonders of the cloud chamber with visitors who were able to see cosmic ray trails for themselves.

It is an incredible journey that cosmic rays make, blasted across space, spiralling along magnetic field lines to end up entangled with carbon in our bodies.

Not only is all life physically permeated by cosmic rays with the potential for nuclei collisions, but some cascading particles smash into atoms of nitrogen and combine with oxygen to create radioactive carbon-14 which enters our atmosphere. Plants absorb it during photosynthesis, and it is incorporated into their carbon skeleton, which we then eat. While plants and animals are alive, carbon-14 is continually replenished as the organism takes in air or food. But when an organism dies no more carbon-14 is absorbed and that which is present starts to decay at a constant rate. By measuring the radioactivity of dead organic matter, the current carbon-14 content can be determined and the time of death established. Cosmic ray activity gives us carbon dating techniques.

Reading

The Geological Unconscious – Jason Groves. Returning to this book that sparked the ideas we explored in our exhibition. A redirection of geology to consider a type of connection between things that are not in themselves geologic. Stones that stare, stones that speak. An image of the human could develop through geologic processes, becoming part of the mineral consciousness. Quoting Heather Sullivan ‘There is a difficulty for biology and philosophy to maintain a reliable distinction between life and non-life.’

The Writing of Stones – Roger Caillois. A paean to the capacity of minerals to form images within the imagination, which in turn is considered to be nothing more than an extension of matter.

The Performances of Sacred Places: crossing, breathing, resisting – edited by Silvia Battista. I read this for some background research while thinking about how I might make work responding to the abandoned sites of the cosmic ray detector huts at Haverah Park on the North Yorkshire Moors.

‘An horizon stands, in modern hermeneutics, for what is possible to see from the position of a specific observer. That is, not only a location in space but also a position in the cultural and historical apprehension of the world.’ Silvia Battista

The book opens by questioning relationships between the site and its ascribed attributes, which may be mercurial qualities not easy to define or quantify. It reflects on the performativity theories of Karen Barad which argue that matter, in its complexity, is an active participant in our relationship to the world and Jane Bennet’s call to recognise the ‘vitality of matter’ that crosses the human non human divide. In the section on ‘crossing’ the sensitive work of Louise Ann Wilson explores ritual around death, grief and loss through walking in rural locations echoing walking an interior landscape of memory. Walking the labyrinth and the pilgrimage are also considered as journeys that take place in physical and metaphysical space.

Tags Advanced Research Centre, air pollution, Argos Panoptes, art, Belly of a rock, carbon, carbon-14, Charlie Franklin, cheong, chiton, Cloud Chamber, Cosmic Chiasmus, cosmic rays, Deborah Tchoudjinoff, gemstones, Greek mythology, Hypha HQ, Jason Groves, Julie F Hill, lenses, lithomancy, Lithos Panoptes, magnetite, Melanie Wheeler, microscopy, minerals, mining, Moonhyung Lee, ocelli, Roger Caillois, Rona Lee, Ruth Siddall, Saint Barbara, santabarbaraite, solargraph, solstice, spiral, The Geological Unconscious, The Writing of Stones, traffic, urban geology

Categories Uncategorized

encompassing a spectrum

May 12, 2025 //

It has been a busy few weeks preparing for The Geological Unconscious at Hypha HQ – a group exhibition, co-curated by Julie F Hill and myself, exploring themes of stone consciousness and human-mineral encounters, destabilising assumptions about passive matter and a stable Earth.

Image: From Roger Caillois’ stone collection: Malachite, masque africain, République démocratique du
Congo, 14 × 20.5 × 6 cm. Photographed in the Museum of Natural History, Paris by Julie F Hill.

Responding to Jason Groves’ inquiry into the mineral imaginary in his eponymous book, as well as the ‘Writing of Stones’ as proposed by writer and mineral collector Roger Caillois, the exhibition exposes the complex entanglements between the organic and the inorganic; the human and the lithic. The Geological Unconscious is viewed through disruptive Surrealist strategies, engagements with the aesthetics of geo-materiality and material processes that attend to the growth and transformation of matter. These artistic ‘excavations’ highlight the toll of extractive industries on our planet, whilst inspiring reverence for the geological lineages of deep, cosmic time. Theories of Animism and Panpsychism are also brought to
bear on ways of attributing agency to inorganic realms.

I am thrilled to be exhibiting with Julie F Hill, Charlie Franklin, Rona Lee and Deborah Tchoudjinoff.

An accompanying events programme includes an urban geology walk with Geologist Ruth Siddall, discussing the origins of the local built environment; an installation and tasting by chef Moonhyung Lee who explores human-mineral entanglements through digestion; a crystal growing workshop led by Julie F Hill and I will be offering visitors lithomancy readings every Friday afternoon.

Investigating human/mineral entanglements for new work to be installed at Hypha HQ for The Geological Unconscious. Video of human activity projected through distorting optical lenses transforms the anthropocentric position to imagine the perspective of the rock. The pattern of lenses is informed by the molecular structure of magnetite,

Magnetite is a naturally magnetic mineral found in many organism’s cells including human brain cells. Mined magnetite is used in industrial and mechanical processes and its use in combustion engines and braking systems is releasing nanoscale pollutant particles from traffic into the air which are finding their way into brain cells in high percentages causing concerns with links to degenerative brain diseases. I have been filming the stop start constant stream of traffic at a local roundabout and made a cast of a brain in gelatine with suspended iron filings. The filings oxidised and so the brain took on an iron red tinge and after a few days it cleaved down the centre and gradually as it dried became more and more chiton like.

Chitons are remarkable molluscs that have changed little in hundreds of millions of years. The chiton has hundreds of tiny eyes in its shell, which is made of eight articulating plates. It is the only known creature with lenses made of minerals rather than protein. Another distinctive feature of the chiton is having rows of teeth primed with magnetite, which aid its homing capabilities through magnetoreception and allow chomping on the hard rock surfaces it clings to. Inside the teeth of some species, the mineral santabarbaraite has been found, named after Santa Barbara, a mining district in Italy where it was first discovered and that honours Saint Barbara, who is the patron saint of mining and tunnelling. Santabarbaraite is also one of the few minerals named after a woman.

Fantastic day chiton hunting in the rockpools on the stunning East Sussex coast. Thanks to family who helped find these well camouflaged unique creatures.

Saint Barbara, was adopted by miners and underground workers as patron saint after the pursuit of geology and the widespread use of gunpowder in mining escalated in the 1600’s. She may have a dubious authenticity but her benedictions are still sought today with many statues installed at the entrances to Crossrail and a large ceremony on her saints day, 4^th December, performed by local priests before tunnelling went ahead. Even at CERN the epicentre of scientific rigour, a shrine to Saint Barbara was established at every shaft site of the Large Hadron Collider requiring excavation and a blessing performed even if the priest had to be lowered by crane down the shaft to achieve this.

My mother’s name was Barbara and her birthday 6^th December is very close to Saint Barbara’s day on the 4^th. It would be great to discover she arrived two days late but there is no one alive now to ask.

Small grains of magnetite are common in igneous rocks, formed from magma having cooled and solidified within the Earth’s crust, and also in metamorphic rock, formed when existing rock is transformed physically or chemically at extreme temperatures.

These processes happen on other planets as well as Earth and so magnetite has also been found in meteorites.

Using a digital microscope to look at the structure of the chondrite meteorite NWA 16975 discovered in the Sahara in 2024 which displays numerous and obvious chondrules and flecks of nickel iron in a fine grained matrix.

Also the fragment I have from the Diogenite meteorite NWA 7831 found in Morocco in 2013.

Looking at wonderfully colourful geological maps of Greece to locate the ancient area of Magnesia – the region where magnetite was first discovered and where its name has derived from – known as “magnes lithos” (stone from Magnesia). Definitely want to plan a research trip to this beautiful region around Thessaloniki.

Exhibitions

Whatshesaid collective of artists present Terra Incognita at Thames-side Studios Gallery – charting and cataloguing the disregarded, the everyday, its surface textures, accumulations, sedimentations.

Joao Villas and Victoria Ahrens showing in Spectral Matters at APT Gallery An understated beautifully curated show whose work references the ephemeral materiality of sound, video, photography and print. The work overlaps and crosses over, both artists responding to the other’s practice. The images create matter, as spectral matter gives agency to the materiality of its own making, while haunting the space with its frequency- it vibrates. The exhibition explores memory, technology and the Anthropocene- and how the disappearing materiality of the world is captured through ephemeral means.

Tags air pollution, art, brain, Charlie Franklin, chiton, Deborah Tchoudjinoff, entanglement, exhibition, gallery, Hypha HQ, inorganic, Jason Groves, Joao Villas, Julie F Hill, lithic, lithomancy, london, Magnesia, magnetite, Maps, meteorite, Moonhyung Lee, organic, photography, rock, rockpools, Rona Lee, Ruth Siddall, Saint Barbara, Stone consciousness, The Geological Unconscious, traffic, urban geology, Victoria Ahrens

Categories Uncategorized

equivalence

March 4, 2025 //

Work continues on ‘mineral visions’ testing projecting through a variety of optical lenses set in a pattern reflecting the crystal structure of magnetite. Magnetite is a mineral we are very intimate with. It is in our cells, in our brain but this delicate balance is being disrupted as magnetite crystals from air pollution now outnumber natural magnetite in the brain by 100:1. The full consequences of this imbalance are not known yet but it could be implicated in neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer’s.

I spent an enjoyable day at London Centre for Book Arts learning how to create a classic full cloth-covered case bound book with a rounded spine. I hope to have picked up some skills here which I will use to make a sculptural book embodying the history of magnetic field reversals stored in the minerals of lava beds on the ocean floor.

Studio visits

Julie F Hill and I had been in contact with writer/producer/curator Ariane Koek since our duo exhibition The Stone Sky at Thames-side Studios Gallery which she had been unable to attend, but with her interest in physics, geology and cosmology had suggested we keep in touch. We finally had the pleasure of meeting Ariane at Julie’s Bomb Factory Studio and were able to share some of our plans for our upcoming show The Geological Unconscious which we are co-curating at Hypha HQ this spring.

It was so good to meet curators Maria Hinel and Indira Dyussebayeva-Ziyabek at my studio to discuss their upcoming project inspired by the essay on carbon in Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table. Levi weaves a story following a single atom of carbon as it is transformed through the many relationships and bonds made with other atoms, moving from rock to atmosphere to living organism and back to mineral.

Gallery visits

Exhibition research trip to Exeter with Julie to see Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery. Artists include: Fern Leigh Albert, Jo Bradford, Chris Chapman, John Curno, Robert Darch, Siân Davey, Susan Derges, Robin Friend, Ashish Ghadiali, Alex Hartley, Nancy Holt, Laura Hopes and Katharine Earnshaw, Richard Long, Garry Fabian Miller, James Ravilious, Tanoa Sasraku, David Spero, Nicholas J R White, Marie Yates.

I was particularly interested in seeing Alex Hartley’s, The Summoning Stones, which is a series of hand coloured prints of standing stones embedded into recycled solar panels. Aiming to bring together ancient and contemporary ways of engaging with the sun they are positioned to put the viewer in the centre of a magical arc of energy; the contemporary may have the bias here and the ancient magic dispersed in the gallery setting but I still enjoyed the aesthetic. The works felt rather cramped in the space. There was a lot of photographic work documenting artist’s interest in the moor from the 60’s/70’s onwards and several prints using the process of dye destruction (luminograms) which I was unfamiliar with, such as those by Gary Fabian Miller – this is a photographic printing process in which colour dyes embedded in the paper are selectively bleached away (destroyed) to form a full-colour image. The papers used in this process are no longer manufactured and Miller spent a year creating one direct long exposure to paper luminogram every day as a reflection on time passing. Extraordinary fluid images from Susan Derges were a highlight.

A luminous intervention of glass Specimens from an Imaginary Voyage by Steffen Dam in the main collection at RAMM.

This splendid Chinese Compass, Lo P’an, also spotted at Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter – used more for alignment of positive energy than navigation.

In Scope at Hypha HQ, Euston curated by James Grossman. An exhibition examining nested systems in nature, there were some fascinating symbioses of technology and natural materials such as live algae prints and sculpture capturing the tidal forces of the Thames estuary. Images 1-3 Alexander Clarke, 4 Will Laslett, 5-7 Kerrie O’Leary, 8 Star Holden, 9-10 James Grossman, 11 Peter James Nasielski, 12-13 James Grossman + Peter James Nasielski, 14 Hanne Peeraer

Great to see Sophie Mei Birkin’s Vestige in Joining Doggerland at APT Gallery. A semi-translucent, glittering, crystal encrusted form suspended like messenger from both the past and the future – a reminder of what once was and what might be.

Citra Sasmita Into Eternal Land at Barbican The Curve. Having turned my hands and kitchen yellow recently grating fresh turmeric I understand why this circle of turmeric powder in the meditation zone was so closely invigilated. A calm scented area after walking the curve of colonial atrocities.

Mike Kelley Ghost and Spirit at Tate Modern. Sublevel (1998) is a model of the basement of CalArts, where he had studied in the 1970s. The spaces that Kelley couldn’t recall from memory are lined with pink crystal resin. The work stages a site of hidden memories and repressed desires, underscored by the symbolism of the pink coloured crystals, as Kelley explained: Because, as everyone knows, regardless of meaningless, exterior coloration, it’s all pink inside. Janelle Monae would agree and regardless of honourable/ironic sentiments employed the aesthetics left me feeling a bit like I’d time travelled to a seedy fairground scenario.

Glad I made it to see UBIK Hypha Studios at Sugar House Island from the Changeable Beast sculpture group. Inspired by the eponymous Philp K Dick novel, the artists invite viewers into speculative narratives of alternative futures. Images left to right: Weeping Willow Ellie Reid, Untitled (from the series ‘You Follow Me Around’) Ellie Reid, Things Said Susan Young, Return of the Dinosaurs Ornela Novello, Sunspots Tessa Garland, Timebeing Diana Wolzak, Inertials Clare Jarrett, Broken Nights Kay Senior

Soil: The World at Our Feet at Somerset House. As it says on the tin – the exhibition sets out to inspire and educate visitors about the power and the fragility of soil, its fundamental role in human civilisation and its remarkable potential to heal our planet. There is so much educational text that the bias of the experience veers towards the didactic. A lot of worms and impressive time lapse video – both of which I like very much and there are some interesting works here but after been slammed with so much ‘fact’ and repetitive tropes it becomes a bit wearying, which is a shame. Sam Williams Wormshine seven channel video collage had a fitting sensitivity to worms as unsung heroes of soft power. Maeve Brennan roman soil with microplastic contamination gave stark evidence of a toxic legacy leaching through the water table to infect roman artefacts. Diana Scherer has woven an intriguing substrate using natural growth processes to generate structures from root tissues. I was interested to see how microscopic soil bacteria can have the appearance of agate and a cross section drawing of a root reminded me of my Mum’s crocheted doilies.

David Cotterell in conversation with Amanda Crawley Jackson, (LCC Professor of Place and Culture / Dean of Research and Knowledge Exchange), at Danielle Arnaud discussing the exhibition and underlying themes of the sublime, suburbia, estuaries, deserts, and human inconsequentiality. Albert Camus’ absurdism philosophy was referenced in respect of the inability to know the world and the world’s indifference to human attempts to even try. David has visited and documented some amazing wide open landscapes of Afghanistan and Mexico where the sublime is inherent in the experience of isolation, vulnerability and awe. We see these in the projected works here. The choppy expanse of the Thames estuary is encapsulated into spherical and domed microcosms, like seeing visions in a series of crystal balls set at eye/brain level – so also a bit like peering directly into the mind’s eye. He expressed the desire to share the experience of being in these landscapes – I think he did share the wonder. He also talked about his visit to Donald Judd’s sculptures in Marfa, Texas where even megalithic sculptures are overwhelmed by the scale of the environment and the milky way is not beyond, but within touching distance.

Events

Royal Astronomical Society Friends Lecture from Dr Steven Banham, Imperial College London. This was an in depth reveal on the geology of Mars. The Mars Science Laboratory mission’s Curiosity rover landed in Mars’ Gale Crater in August 2012. About the size of a MINI Cooper, Curiosity is equipped with 17 cameras and a robotic arm containing specialized instruments. It has explored the northern margin of Mount Sharp for 4451 Martian sols providing compelling evidence that shortly after crater formation, a habitable environment existed here. The rocks that form lower Mount Sharp preserve a record of persistent lakes fed by fluvial systems originating from the crater rim. As the rivers entered the lake, they released plumes of sediment and assorted nutrients into the water column to be distributed across the lakebed — recorded as the Murray formation. Geochemical and mineralogical assessments indicate that environmental conditions preserved in these layered rocks would have sustained life, if it were present. On Sol 3047, Curiosity made a sharp right turn after crossing the phyllosilicate unit, to drive up into the orbitally-defined sulphate-bearing unit. From this point, Curiosity witnessed distinct changes in the stratigraphy, recording a progressive drying of the ancient environment. The rover identified a gradual change from humid conditions containing a record of perennial lakes, to isolated ephemeral lakes, and onto desolate deserts. During this ascent, interstratification of aeolian strata became increasingly common, including sand sheets, dune strata and deflation scours. However, despite this general aridification, the succession was occasionally punctuated by episodes of abundant water: the Amapari ripple bed for example, records a brief shallow lake: a veritable oasis, free of ice.

I travelled to Manchester to see Figures in Extinction, a dance trilogy exploring the age of disconnection. A beautiful, haunting and sobering collaboration between choreographer Crystal Pite, NDT 1 dancers and Complicité director Simon McBurney. The first section confronts the extinction crisis and climate change deniers, listing the last of each species vanishing from our world; the second section addresses human isolation in a world dominated by technology and data, the divided brain where the intuitive side of our brain has not been nurtured leaving the rational unempathetic side to be dominant, and the final section draws our focus to death, physical decay of the body and grief, urging an honouring of our ancestors – the dead, having lived are not inert. The lighting throughout was amazing but particularly extraordinary in the closing scenes as ethereal spectres swarm the stage. The dancers, so precise in their movements delivered a hugely emotional homage to life on Earth.

East is South by Beau Willimon at Hampstead Theatre. There was a lengthy monologue on equivalence in this fast paced play projecting a future where AI or AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) learns to take on the experience of faith over logic. Two coders stand accused of releasing a dangerous AI to infect processors globally. Their motivation interrogated as potential spy or subject to religious cult beliefs. “God didn’t create the universe,” it may be “the universe’s project to create God.” After all, if Agi escapes to colonise the internet, knowing everything about everything, and having power over everything, wouldn’t “she” become our “God?” With personal memories questioned as truth as much as being duped by others for their own ends, there is no clear path in a complete breakdown of trust and authority. I see this play has had a lot of bad reviews – it is dense with ideas and maybe the interrogation format is not new but it has a lot to say that is relevant.

Tags AI, air pollution, Alex Hartley, Ariane Koek, art, artist books, book arts, carbon, Citra Sasmita, compass, Crystal Pite, crystals, Curiosity, David Cotterell, Diana Scherer, Diana Wolzak, Dr Steven Banham, Ellie Reid, Garry Fabian Miller, Indira Dyussebayeva-Ziyabek, James Grossman, luminograms, Maeve Brennan, magnetic field reversal, magnetite, Maria Hinel, Mars, Mike Kelley, Nancy Holt, NDT1, ocean floor, photography, Primo Levi, Richard Long, Royal Astronomical Society, Sam Williams, science, Simon McBurney, soil, Sophie Mei Birkin, Steffen Dam, Susan Derges, technology, Tessa Garland, The Periodic Table, video projection, writing

Categories Uncategorized

abstractions

October 5, 2024 //

The ‘Art, Science and Creativity’ exhibition at Liverpool’s spectacular Central Library continues. The exhibition is inspired by statements from Albert Einstein, highlighting the fact that creativity is central to explorations in both art and science. As we wonder, and attempt to understand the universe and ourselves, categories can, and perhaps should, become blurred. Distinctions can be both valuable and problematic: ‘art’ versus ‘science’, ‘nature’ versus ‘human’, ‘natural’ versus ‘supernatural’, ‘material’ versus ‘spiritual’, ‘secular’ versus ‘religious’ and so on. And as the great science-fiction writer Arthur C Clarke said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

I am very happy to have two unique books included in the exhibition. In/Out and Unbound.

Liverpool Book Art and Fevered Imagination are collaborating to create a video loop of all the artworks, enabling audiences to get a fuller appreciation of the artists’ creativity than allowed by the use only of display cases. Fevered Imagination is a website dedicated to Artists Books, through which works from the exhibition can be bought.

I am delighted to be invited by Serendipity Arts Foundation to show Cosmic Chiasmus: crossing the universe at Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa later this year.

Serendipity Arts Foundation is an organisation that facilitates pluralistic cultural expressions, sparking conversations around the arts across the South Asian region. Committed to innovation and creativity, the aim of the Foundation is to support practice and research in the arts, as well as to promote sustainability and education in the field through a range of cultural and collaborative initiatives. The Foundation hosts projects throughout the year, which include institutional partnerships with artists and arts organisations, educational initiatives, grants, and outreach programs across India.

Serendipity Arts Festival is one of the largest multi-disciplinary arts initiatives in the South Asian region. It spans the visual, performing, and culinary arts, whilst exploring genres with film, live arts, and literature. Besides the core content, which is conceptualised by an eminent curatorial panel, the Festival has various layers of programming, in the form of educational initiatives, workshops, special projects, and institutional engagements. Through active conversations between the artistic community and the urban, social landscape, the Festival continues to evolve around the mandate of making the arts visible and accessible. The Festival is driven by a spirit of collaboration, hoping to inspire new perspectives and fresh aesthetic encounters. This labour of love is a cultural experiment that also addresses issues such as arts education, patronage culture, interdisciplinary discourse, inclusivity, and accessibility in the arts.

Other exciting news is that Julie F. Hill and myself are working together again on a new project. Following on from our ambitious duo show A Stone Sky at Thames-side Studios Gallery (Nov 23), we will be curating and participating in an exhibition next spring, exploring themes of stone consciousness and human-mineral encounters.

In the studio I have been working on a proposal for the Moon Gallery. Moon Gallery is an international collaborative artwork and a gallery of ideas which aims to set up the first permanent museum on the Moon. Moon Gallery will launch 100 artefacts to the Moon within the compact format of a 10 x 10 x 1cm plate on a lunar lander exterior panelling as early as 2025.

Each sculpture has to fit within a 1cm cube, which is quite challenging. My proposal is a 5mm spherical magnet sparkling with black volcanic sand on a 1cm square of patinated copper. Space exploration means leaving the protective shield of Earth’s magnetic field, placing astronauts and technology at risk from increased levels of harmful high energy particles. This artwork is a small realization of a magnetic field offered as a symbol of safe passage to those venturing beyond our home planet and protection of Earth’s magnetosphere. The black volcanic sand used in this work is naturally magnetic, making visible the force that emanates from the core of the magnet. The patination colour reflects on the astonishing view of our blue planet from the moon and the importance of water to sustain life. The title Core Values, makes reference to the molten core necessary for a planet to generate a magnetic field as well as the ethical principles and beliefs that guide humanity in a positive spirit of peaceful cooperation for the benefit of all. The work operates as a motif for what is in the heart of a body, rocky or otherwise. It also celebrates the beauty of the elements and natural forces that together inspire the human imagination and makes the cosmos so exciting to explore.

I have been sorting out the copper contours from The Absolute Hut (of action potential) as I couldn’t store this work, it had to be dismantled. The copper will be reused in future work.

I am making a new concrete tablet for Instruments of the Anemoi series with more detailed compass rose inspired copper insets. The copper is guillotined to shape and screen printed with a sugarlift solution.

The pieces are then dipped in bitumen and left to dry before putting in a bath of warm water to dissolve the sugar solution, leaving the design ready to be etched.

I also cut some copper shapes to patinate, painting the copper with salt and vinegar and soy sauce before fuming in an ammonia bath. I love how the colours change throughout the process.

I was going to patinate the dodecagon shapes as well but in the test I did, I lost a lot of detail, so these will just be inked and left.

Gallery Visits

Charmaine Watkiss showing her beautiful drawings full of symbolism in Hard Graft at Wellcome Collection. The exhibition explores the impact of work on health and her works celebrate the ancestral herbal knowledge of medicinal and edible plants and fruits that carry powerful healing properties.

These were used to secretly cure illnesses and prevent diseases as an act of survival and self-dependency, distinct from Western medicine. The connection between herbal healing and African spiritual practices is represented by cosmological symbols discreetly tattooed on the women’s bodies. Natural dyes – such as Jamaica’s Blue Mountain coffee and indigo – and materials such as brass and raffia palm embed historical knowledge in the fabric of the works. This knowledge is preserved, yet concealed, by the figures who avoid the viewer’s gaze.

The London Group Stillness in Movement at Bermondsey Project Space. Taking three evocative lines from Four Quartets by T S Eliot as a starting point for this group show. Images – Carol Wyss, Sandra Crisp, Genetic Moo and Beverley Duckworth.

‘Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea’

Rona Lee Lithic Entanglements at Sedgewick Museum of Earth Sciences. A considered intervention in the Whewell Mineral Gallery to ‘bring the dirt back in’, making evident the scarred landscapes, physical extraction processes as well as the social strata of those involved in procuring such a collection. There is no denying the allure of minerals and gemstones and the work here captures the beauty of the rocks while also reminding us of the ravaged Earth left scarred and depleted.

‘A Modern Lapidary a video work, back projected through one of the free-standing cases, animates mid-century scientific photographs of minerals, altering our perception of the samples within as ‘dead’ matter. Elsewhere, in An Extractive Index, digitally collaged photographs of geological field trips are laminated on to the glass, inviting reflection on the social and environmental relationships which these reveal.’

The Museum itself was also fascinating to look round and after Rona’s artist talk we were treated to tea in the The John Watson Building Stones Gallery which houses the most complete collection of stones used in construction.

Emma Stibbon Melting Ice | Rising Tides at Towner Eastbourne. A day trip to the see this remarkable body of work so thoughtfully curated. The pale majesty of ice or chalk cliff faces, fragile against pounding seas that Emma witnesses in both the polar and local Sussex coastlines are captured so poignantly. These are portraits of great bodies under stress. Close up, edges and lines break down into fluid, watery strokes, a diaphanous translation of the fast painterly sketches made in often gruelling conditions. Wonderfully immersive, through scale and placement, and the understated palette of deep muted greens and blues, almost blacks and luminous whites which draw the viewer into the landscapes.

Listening

Sideways – A New Frontier. A four-part podcast about the ethics of space exploration with former NASA astronaut Nicole Stott, new astronaut Ed Dwight, Space Philosopher and author Frank White, Anthropologist of Space and Religion, Deana Weibel, Professor of Religion at Knox College Robert Geraci and former ISRO scientist, Jijith Nadumari Ravi.

Astronauts and space tourists often cite the overview effect as a transformative experience offering the perspective to see a shared planet with no borders. Some however, experience the ‘ultraview’ effect which is the overwhelming and disorienting knowledge of the magnitude of the universe.

BBC Inside Science Podcast. How much of a risk is space junk? As we send more and more metal in the form of satellites up into space, scientists are warning it is becoming more of a risk both here – and up there.

Much space junk comes from defunct satellites. There are plans to launch 60,000 more satellites by 2030. It is estimated there is currently 12, 400 tons of space junk orbiting Earth – 2,500 discarded satellites and 130 million fragments that travel at 10 times the speed of a bullet. Because of the orbiting junk, Space X satellites must make around 275 collision avoidance manoeuvres every day. It is not only dangerous in space but large debris is falling to Earth and not burning up in the atmosphere. It is predicted life will be lost in the next decade as a result of falling space junk, there have already been some near misses. The satellites and launch debris that does burn up in the atmosphere releases large amounts of metal into the atmosphere with unknown consequences.

Tags A Stone Sky, Albert Einstein, art, Arthur C Clarke, Beverley Duckworth, Carol Wyss, Charmaine Watkiss, copper patination, Core Values, Cosmic Chiasmus, creativity, culture, Emma Stibbon, exhibition, Fevered Imagination, Genetic Moo, Instruments of the Anemoi, Julie F. Hill, Liverpool Book Art, Liverpool Central Library, Moon Gallery, Rona Lee, Sandra Crisp, Sedgewick Museum of Earth Sciences, Serendipity Arts Festival, Serendipity Arts Foundation, space junk, sugarlift, The Absolute Hut, The London Group, Towner Eastbourne, Wellcome Collection

Categories Uncategorized

The footsteps of Magnes

Carbon

below and beyond

encompassing a spectrum

equivalence

abstractions

Follow Blog via Email

Recent Posts

Archives