Archives for posts with tag: Belly of a rock

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

The Geological Unconscious

June 10, 2025 //

‘What truth could be more unexpected ….than the one in which the mineral envisions while also being envisioned.’ Jason Groves, The Geological Unconscious

‘This is the blueprint of nature itself; both hidden and revealed in a nodule of silica.’
Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones

The Geological Unconscious opened with an exceptionally busy Private View. It was a fantastic evening with lots of great feedback. With a multi-disciplinary approach, large-scale installations and sculptural works sit alongside embroidery, video, expanded print and photographic work, to create material intimacies that help situate us in scales beyond the human.

My video installation Lithos Panoptes imagines a view of the world from the perspective of the rock via the molecular structure of magnetite. 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.

Magnetite is a mineral found in magma and metamorphic rock in Earth’s crust as well as in meteorites. Magnetite nanoparticles are also found naturally in organisms and are known to aid magnetoreception, a
means whereby animals and birds orientate themselves by sensing polar direction.
Through these actual and metaphoric lenses the relationship between the organic and non-organic is explored. Imagery includes allusions to scientific research into the dramatic overwhelming of innate magnetite in human brain cells by nanoscale pollutant particles of magnetite released into the air by traffic; the unique qualities of the chiton, a mollusc with hundreds of tiny eyes made from rock rather than biological material and teeth primed with magnetite and containing recently discovered mineral santabarbaraite; Saint Barbara, patron saint of miners and tunnellers, adopted when the use of explosives in mining escalated in the 1600’s and whose benedictions are still sought today with shrines installed at tunnel entrances at Crossrail and even at CERN, the epicentre of scientific rigour.

Also showing the video sculpture Belly of a Rock – describing an imagined place of chemical conversations at the intersection of the animate and inanimate. Under a crusted shell, surfaces slide and scrape along lines of fissure, distended innards ooze and rocks moan as they are distorted by untold pressure. The turbulent spiralling of the molten core births rock and lifeforms which are acted upon by the drag of an oscillating magnetic field.

Julie F Hill’s large-scale sculptural print installation Parent Body, uses scanning electron microscope imagery of samples recently returned from asteroid Bennu. The data features detail of carbon-rich and organic ‘nano-globules’ which have been theorised as ‘proto-cells’. The sculpture evokes astro-geological-biological material lineages across deep space and cosmological time. In a contrast of scale, Julie is also showing Return, 3d print of asteroid Itokawa cast in plaster-of-paris with a bead of Iridium. Iridium is an rare-earth element more abundant in asteroids than the Earth’s crust. This miniature work considers the cross exchanges between space and earth 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.

Charlie Franklin’s work considers control, physical experience and memory within the natural landscape. Her research includes how formations such as standing stones, grottos and geological debris remain or change across time. With a particular interest in materials and the properties they hold, she is experimental in her approach to making. Everyday items including cardboard, plastic sheeting and gaffer tape are repurposed to build the foundations of her sculptural work. Franklin also collects found imagery such as postcards and photographs, which she reworks to become something else.

In Litho/Domous, Rona Lee layers photographic plates from mass produced ‘coffee table’ books onto lighting panels, utilising the ‘bleed’ between them that this reveals, to evoke the tectonic instabilities of
contemporary eco relations. Originating in the post war ‘golden age of capitalism’, and designed as statement pieces for home display, the aspirational focus of these image-rich publications on culture, travel, landscape, can be said to prefigure the arc of the smartphone in making the world consumable. At the same time titles such as The Mineral Kingdom and Library of Nations speak to the legacies of the Enlightenment project, offering up an order of things in which Mankind / the Anglophone world is positioned as ascendant and Nature – along with ‘other’ cultures – is ‘put on the table’.

Deborah Tchoudjinoff’s video installation The City of Gold takes a speculative look at Earth in the far future. Her work considers vast, beyond human, geological timescales where continents have once again become one. Past supercontinents create room to speculate upon future ones if we understand Earth as shifting, moving matter. Starting as a short fiction text Tchoudjinoff began to form an imagined world of cities in a future supercontinent of Amasia. The fictional cities named after the minerals that are heavily sought – rare earths, copper, uranium, gold, and coal – hinting at the narrative of an Earth depleted of the resources we rely on. The City of Gold is one of five imagined cities.

An accompanying events programme includes an urban geology walk with Geologist Ruth Siddall, discussing the origins of the local built environment; Cheong 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. The reading of stones 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.

Once I start thinking of minerals as something we swallow to make our body function, I also start to think of how our body comes to be composed of these minerals, and that when we gradually decay after death we become mineral components again. So, the gesture of swallowing a tablet or vitamin pill is as magical, or let’s say as supernatural, as we want, because we really are swallowing a stone. – Otobong Nkanga

Link to Marina Walker essay The Writing of Stones published by Cabinet Magazine.

London once had many stones. They made convenient landmarks for gatherings and councils, or else marked boundaries or distances. As a result, they often crop up in place names – Link to The Londonist ‘Lost Stones of London’.

Gallery visits

Mónica Alcázar-Duarte in Cultural Reforesting Exhibition at Orleans House Gallery. In this exhibition, the artists remind us that we not only have a relationship with nature but also that we are nature. We are human animals. Together, with our more-than-human neighbours, we are a growing, singing, howling forest.

Under the big Suffolk skies of Orford Ness. Walking landscape that bears the scars, physical and emotionally resonant, of years of intense military top secret experiments. Here radar was developed, the aiming of bombs was refined, material vulnerability was tested with destructive, explosive projectiles under simulations of attack and famously it is the site of environmental tests during the late 50’s, early 60’s, in the development for detonation of the atomic bomb.

The weight of the shingle shored up around the buildings and on the roofs used to dampen the explosions.

There is a lot to respond to. It is now a spectacular nature reserve but apparently not so many birds here this year. We were lucky to see a short eared owl hunting and some gangly spoonbills in flight.

Kaori Homma Silent Echoes at The Watch House, Orford Quay – Inspired by Orford Ness, the UK’s only site of atomic experimentation, this exhibition explores the hidden histories and lingering memories within its landscape. Through the unconventional method of Aburi dashi or fire etching, the artist explores not only the visible remnants of the secret history of Orford Ness, but also the unspoken memories that linger in the air. Unlike ordinary drawings made by the pigments on the surface of paper, Homma’s works are made by fire which etches the images into the body of paper as a burn mark.

Electric Dreams at Tate Modern celebrates the early innovators of optical, kinetic, programmed and digital art, who pioneered a new era of immersive sensory installations and automatically-generated works. This major exhibition brings together ground breaking works by a wide range of international artists who engaged with science, technology and material innovation.

Desmond Paul Henry used a repurposed bombsight computer, designed to drop bombs more accurately, as developed at Orford Ness, to make a drawing machine which he then hand embellished.

The Pleasure of Misuse curated by Indira Dyussebayeva-Ziyabek and Maria Hinel at Royal Society of Sculptors. ‘The humour that springs from manipulating or referencing the mundane is paradoxically self-reflexive – appropriated objects suddenly appear anthropomorphic, our laughter becomes directed at ourselves and the intermittent absurdity of the human condition. The Pleasure of Misuse explores the mechanics and psychology of humour in the everyday, considering its potential to heal and its power to disarm, creating the sense of complicity and the space for self-reflection amid these anxious times.’

Images – Andy Holden, Ty Locke, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Cornelia Parker, Richard Wentworth

Samuel Zealey, Angela Eames, Tony Fleming, Charlotte Guerard, John Strutton and Kate Fahey in Heavenly Skeletons at Coleman Project Space – six contemporary artists whose work repositions drawing as an expanded multidisciplinary field. Heavenly Skeletons is a dynamic investigation of how drawing translates abstract concepts into tangible form…

Gorgeous show with thoughtfully chosen works that like Samuel Zealey’s vertiginous sculpture balance perfectly.

Tags Aburi dashi, Andy Holden, Angela Eames, asteroid, Belly of a rock, Charlie Franklin, chiton, Coleman Project Space, Cornelia Parker, Deborah Tchoudjinoff, Electric Dreams, Hypha HQ, Hypha Studios, Indira Dyussebayeva-Ziyabek, Jason Groves, John Strutton, Julie F Hill, Kaori Homma, Kate Fahey, lithomancy, Lithos Panoptes, magnetite, Maria Hinel, minerals, Orford Ness, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Richard Wentworth, Roger Caillois, Rona Lee, Ruth Siddall, Saint Barbara, Samuel Zealey, sculpture, Tate Modern, The Geological Unconscious, Tony Fleming, Ty Locke

Categories Uncategorized

formation

August 5, 2024 //

In search of huts. I have been on a mission to locate and document the remaining huts from a cosmic ray detection experiment at Haverah Park on the Pennine moorland in North Yorkshire.

When high-energy cosmic rays enter the atmosphere, they set off a chain-reaction particle cascade known as an extensive air shower. The Haverah Park experiment was home to one of the largest extensive cosmic ray air shower arrays in the world.

It was operated by the Physics Department of the University of Leeds for 20 years, closing in 1987. An array of over 200 water-Cherenkov detectors covering 12 km2 were active during its operation and many 1000’s of extensive air showers were recorded, including ones of such size that the cosmic rays that generated them had energies previously unthought of, adding to the mystery of where they come from.

The large energy density of cosmic rays is close to that of starlight, adding their own glow to the sky as they blast across the universe. Cosmic rays are the atomic nuclei of elements ranging from hydrogen to uranium accelerated to high energies, with half being protons and most positively charged.

Much of the technology used to observe cosmic rays has changed little over the decades since first inventions and still plays a role within newer technologies.

It appeals to me that the excitement of observing particles from other galaxies happened at these unassuming structures.

Sharing the landscape of Haverah Park cosmic ray air shower detector array huts are the striking white radomes that shield secret radar equipment at RAF Menwith Hill. The spy station has been there since the cold war space race began in the mid-fifties. Little is known about what goes on here but broadly it is said to gather electronic intelligence and is operated by US National Security Agency (NSA) and UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). As satellite technology has increased so has the number of radomes which now number 37 at the site. It is worth noting that satellites are vulnerable to unpredictable space weather and cosmic ray interference.

The total number of particles detected in a shower can be used to estimate the energy of the primary cosmic ray. Some particles contain the highest energy form of radiation known to exist anywhere in the universe and their origin is one of science’s greatest mysteries. Air showers of secondary particles generated from a primary cosmic ray hitting the Earth’s atmosphere are spread over many kilometres when they hit the ground so it is useful to have detectors spread over a large area. The difference in the time of arrival of recorded particles at multiple detectors can be used to estimate the arrival direction of the primary cosmic ray. However, this does not necessarily reveal the origin of the particle as magnetic fields within the galaxies bend their trajectories so that the memory of their original direction is obfuscated.

The cosmic ray detectors I made for the The Breath of Stars use a block of plastic scintillator which emits a short burst of UV light when a charged particle passes through it which is picked up by a single-photon-sensitive device. The detectors used at Haverah Park are water Cherenkov detectors. These are large steel tanks of purified water with photon sensitive detectors in the water.

While the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant its speed through a material may be significantly reduced as it is slowed by the medium. A particle passing through a material faster than that at which light can travel through the material loses electrons thereby emitting light. When cosmic rays pass through the water tanks, they emit Cherenkov radiation because they travel faster than the speed of light in water. Cherenkov light is similar to the production of a sonic boom when an airplane is traveling through the air faster than sound waves can move through the air. Pavel Cherenkov along with Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm discovered and demonstrated this phenomenon in 1934, astonishingly, it had been predicted in 1888 by Oliver Heaviside, and in 1910 Marie Curie had noticed a strange blue glow from her radium experiments.

Some of the huts from the Haverah Park experiment are no more than a concrete shadow of where they once stood.

Other huts from the Haverah Park experiment are in a state of collapse.

One hut proclaiming ‘You Are Being Watched’ was as impenetrable as Menwith Hill. Not a gap to peep through and securely barred. Only cosmic rays can enter here.

There are so many high energy particles hurtling around the universe that they almost equal starlight in energy density. Cosmic rays travel at almost the speed of light and because they are charged particles most cosmic rays are confined, spiralling within our galaxy for a million years or more, by the magnetic fields which permeate it.

Five million cosmic rays pass through your body each day. Some will collide with atomic nuclei. A particle passing through a material at a velocity greater than that at which light can travel through the material emits light. Maybe we glow a little.

Following the disappearing trail. Haverah Park hut with an intriguing hexagon tank.

Inside Hut no. 7 is a dumping ground. Waste is a big problem in space as well as on Earth. The thickening shell of space junk in low Earth orbit, if left to accumulate, could cause a conductive shield to form, weakening the effectiveness of the magnetosphere, which protects life on earth from most cosmic radiation.

A decaying wall map of the entire Haverah Park experiment is just visible through a window of one of the huts in the central hub, but not much else remains inside.

It looks like these huts have been recently emptied into a skip which, by chance, was collected while I was there. Unfortunately, the driver had no enlightening information for me about the future of the huts.

Cherenkov radiation is a form of energy that gives off a blue glow when electrically charged particles are moving at speeds faster than light is able to travel through the same medium. The experimental physicist Blackett, who received the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physics for his investigations into cosmic rays, believed that extensive air showers should produce flashes of light that could be perceived by the human eye when lying down and looking upwards under dark skies. Whether he achieved seeing this phenomena himself is not known, but he inspired colleagues Galbraith and Jelley, in 1952, to devise an experiment to detect light from air showers using a rubbish bin painted black on the inside, a recycled searchlight mirror and a small phototube. With these simple items, they made the first observation of Cherenkov light produced by cosmic rays passing through the atmosphere. Not all the twinkling in the night sky is starlight.

During the Haverah Park experiment, the water Cherenkov detectors deployed across the moors were connected by underground cables and transmitted information to the control huts via radio signals in the microwave frequency range. All communication is now severed. Cut cables coil in rain filled tanks. The cosmic rays are still pounding down upon these new unwatched ecosystems but the detectors have moved elsewhere.

I am looking forward to meeting Professor Alan Watson FRS here in the autumn. He is eminent in the field of cosmic rays and helped initiate the extensive air shower project, working at Haverah Park for 25 years. He has kindly agreed to meet and share his insider knowledge of the history and operations at the site.

The idea to build a truly giant shower array was launched by Alan Watson and Jim Cronin shortly after Haverah Park was decommissioned and thanks to the ground breaking work undertaken in these huts, it evolved to become the vast Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, named in honour of the man who first discovered extensive air showers.

Peering into the darkness, trying to fathom the structures of the universe or what’s inside the hut, and the nature of that relationship.

The ultra high energy particles detected at Havarah Park and new arrays across the globe are very rare, possibly less than one per square kilometre per century, so it is big news when one arrives. Because they have such high energy, it is thought they shouldn’t be affected by galactic magnetic fields, and therefore, the direction of the particle could be determined and the source located. The Amaterasu particle, named after the sun goddess in Japanese mythology, the second most powerful particle to be recorded, appears to have emerged from the Local Void, ana area with no astronomical objects that might produce such a particle. There is no explanation of where these particles come from, just hints of bigger mysteries to unfold.

Many water tanks remain around Haverah Park, stripped of their purpose as water Cherenkov detectors they now reflect the sky in the rainfall they collect rather than record showers of particles from space.

During operation, huts were built in groups of three, each with six large galvanised steel tanks lined with white plastic to diffuse the light and filled with local purified water. Each tank was monitored by extremely sensitive photon detectors which recorded the Cherenkov light emitted as particles passed through the water. At the end of the large array experiment, one of the detectors was opened, and the water was found to be crystal clear and good enough to drink. The proof that water could be kept bacteria-free in a sealed container for over 25 years gave confidence in using the same technology for a future larger cosmic ray detector array to be developed.

Haverah Park was once one of the largest extensive air shower arrays in the world, with an area of 12 km2, but in the end, it just wasn’t big enough.

When Alan Watson and Jim Cronin proposed building a new 3000 km2 shower array, the question from funders was, ‘why do you want to make the array so large?’. The answer is, of course, to discover those known and unknown unknowns, but funders don’t usually like unpredictable outcomes. Luckily their plea was bolstered by the Fly’s Eye Cosmic Ray Detector Array out in the Utah Desert recording the Oh-My-God particle in 1991, it’s energy was 40 million times greater than that of any particles ever produced in any terrestrial particle accelerator. This and other evidence of extremely high energy particles sparked interest in the field of astrophysics and validated the discovery of similar particles at Haverah Park, which had not been taken seriously at the time. This ambitious proposal gained momentum during the 1990s to become the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, with the detector design developed from the water Cherenkov tanks so successfully operated at Haverah Park. The huts here may be in ruins, but their legacy lives on at the world’s largest extensive air shower detector array, which is edging closer to answer the question ‘Where do ultra-high-energy cosmic rays come from?’

I am looking forward to developing work responding to the legacy of the Haverah Park experiment and building on my experience of creating The Absolute Hut (of absolute potential) New surfaces to explore, more moss, and also lichens here.

‘The Belly of a Rock’ video has waited a long time for its crusted shell. A hybrid between rock, mollusc, and technology inspired by the chemical conversations and urge to create described by Italo Calvino in his story ‘The Spiral’. We don’t always know what we are creating. Within ‘the belly’ surfaces slide and scrape along lines of fissure, distended innards ooze and rocks moan as they are distorted by untold pressure. The turbulent spiralling of the core births rock and lifeforms acted upon by the drag of the oscillating magnetic field.

I have acquired a large number of photochromic optical lenses. These I have sorted by diameter, thickness and distortion. Initial thoughts about their use include using them as petri dishes to grow crystals which are embedded into small concrete hexagonal pillars of differing heights with reference to the geology of giants causeway. Using them to create composite windows into a new hut structure filled with video projections referencing the fly’s eye cosmic detector array.

A good workout on the guillotine making 201 cuts in copper sheet in preparation for a new concrete tablet in the Instruments of the Anemoi sculpture series.

Gallery and other outings:

Beverley Duckworth’s installation Surplus at Goldsmiths MFA final show. Beverley’s work is grown through a diligent process of care. Found materials are literally given new life in the seeds which are embedded into them, which then transform and colour them. The installation includes an intermittent sound element of recordings of the melody played by waste trucks in Taiwan to call people to bring out their rubbish.

Apparently I wasn’t the first person to be struck by similarities to the landscape of Yangshuo near Guilin China. I visited in 1984 and think it is no longer a quiet little village.

It was the first time I had been back inside the Ben Pimlott building at Goldsmiths since by own graduation, a scary twenty years ago. The building was brand new then and the views with little visible green fed into my installation Re:construction – a large screen print with tiny viewing hole to a tiny oasis amidst the grey, albeit a synthetic one.

Yinka Shonibare Suspended States at Serpentine South. Horrors of war and colonialism are filed under dazzling colour, birds on the brink of extinction stare in plea or accusation, beacons of light in the darkness come from miniature replicas of sanctuaries.

Yinka’s socially engaged inclusive practice spills over into real help for artists and communities. The exhibition celebrates Guest Projects and G.A.S. Foundation in Lagos. Guest Projects is such a generous idea and I have been so lucky to benefit from it with the project Laboratory of Dark Matters

Being awarded a month’s residency at Guest Projects was crucial to the success of Laboratory of Dark Matters as a site for developing ideas and subsequently touring the project. Wonderful to meet Yinka and also to be part of the selection committee for the next round of projects.

Judy Chicago Revelations at Serpentine North. The highlight of this show is the video documenting The Dinner Party (1974-79) installation and the preparatory drawings and sample plate. What a shame the actual installation wasn’t here, I will have to visit the Brooklyn Museum, New York sometime to see it. The research, collaborations, crafts and designs that went into creating it was phenomenal.

Saw Complicité’s excellent Mnemonic at The National Theatre, 25 years after first seeing it at Riverside Studios. ‘A body is found in the ice, and a woman is looking for her father while a man searches for his lost lover. Mnemonic is as much about origins as it is about memory, and remembering what is lost. Mnemonic asks us: what is our place in the natural world? How have human relationships with the environment shaped patterns of migration? Who are we, and where do we come from? ‘

Visited the delightful mellow brick country home and extensive gardens of pioneering naturalist Gilbert White at Selborne. His book ‘The Natural History of Selborne’ (1789) has never been out of print since it was published more than 230 years ago. He was brought to many people’s attention, including mine, during the pandemic and lockdowns of 2020 when writer Melissa Harrison included his diary readings in her podcast The Stubborn Light of Things.

Tags Alan Watson, Amaterasu particle, atmosphere, Belly of a rock, Beverley Duckworth, Cherenkov radiation, Complicite, copper, cosmic ray detector, cosmic rays, Eskdalemuir Magnetic Observatory, Fly's Eye, Gilbert White, Goldsmiths, Guest Projects, Haverah Park, Igor Tamm, Ilya Frank, Instruments of the Anemoi, Italo Calvino, Jim Cronin, Judy Chicago, Laboratory of Dark Matters, lenses, magnetic field, Marie Curie, Melissa Harrison, Menwith Hill, Mnemonic, moss, Patrick Blackett, Pavel Cherenkov, physics, Pierre Auger, radiation, space junk, spiral, starlight, technology, The Absolute Hut (of action potential), The breath of stars, University of Leeds, Yangshuo, Yinka Shonibare

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IN/ORGAN.IC

July 8, 2024 //

Delighted to have both my artists books In/Out and Unbound accepted into the Art, Science and Creativity exhibition curated by Liverpool Book Art at Liverpool Central Library in the autumn. The starting point for this exhibition is a quote from Albert Einstein:

“Where the world ceases to be a stage for personal hopes, aspirations, and desires, and we stand before it as free creatures, full of admirations, questions and contemplation, we enter the realm of art and science. If we describe what we see and experience in the language of logic, we do science; if we convey connections through forms that are inaccessible to the rational mind, but intuitively recognisable as making sense, we do art.”

Open Studios 2024 – showing the two channel video installation Radical Pair in my studio.

In Thames-side Studios Gallery showcase of studio holders works I presented one of the sculptures from the Instruments of the Anemoi series.

Work in progress on hybrid sculpture Belly of a Rock adding spirals of crushed mussel shells to the crusted casing that will house a monitor screen. Earth rotates faster at the Equator than it does at the poles causing spiral convection currents in the liquid iron outer core. Earth’s magnetic field is created in this swirling outer core where magnetism is about fifty times stronger than it is on the rocky surface of the Earth.

Trochus (sea snail) shell buttons seen at Borders Textile Towerhouse, Hawick. The buttons made from these molluscs found in warm waters are used for the Borders quality knitwear industry. Genuine shell can apparently be identified from imitation by touch, it always feels cool even in hot temperatures.

We do not yet know another form of life other than carbonaceous life. All life on Earth uses the same biochemistry of carbon.

Reminded by the solstice, I finally installed some solargraph pin hole cameras at Hogsmill Nature Reserve. I have had the tins prepared for a long while so not sure if they will work. The lagoon was worryingly green.

A recent Royal Society research article reveals that extreme solar events such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections can release bursts of energetic particles towards Earth which are found preserved in the rings of partially fossilized trees as huge spikes in carbon-14. Through the individual analysis of ancient tree rings from subfossils found in the Drouzet River in the Southern French Alps, scientists discovered evidence of a giant solar storm dated to around 14,300 years ago. This event appears to have been enormously more powerful than the Carrington Event of 1859 when fires broke out in telegraph offices.

Radiocarbon is produced in the upper atmosphere as cosmic rays collide with particles in the atmosphere. It is absorbed by plants during photosynthesis and enters the food chain of organisms and because it decays at a known rate, scientists can use it to determine when the organism died using carbon dating processes. Solar storms tend to deflect the number of energetic particles coming from outer space but a violent storm will create much more radioactive carbon-14 which will subsequently be absorbed by life on Earth. Radiocarbon dating is not exact because the atmospheric ¹⁴C/¹²C ratio varies due to cosmic ray activity, nuclear explosions and solar activity. Still from Cosmic Chiasmus: crossing the universe.

For scientists using the radiocarbon dating technique it is important to know the carbon-12 content of the contemporary atmosphere. A calibration curve of carbon-12 in the atmosphere is provided by an international body using many archive records but the most precise and accurate are based on dendrochronologically dated tree-ring series. Stills from Time Crystals.

Other evidence of this major radiation storm 14,300 years ago is also seen in ice cores having a higher concentration of an isotope of beryllium extracted from Greenland. These incredibly powerful geomagnetic storms are known as Miyake events. Nine Miyake events have been identified in the last 15,000 years, the most recent being around 774 CE.

Radioactivity was discovered by Henri Becquerel while working on a series of experiments on phosphorescent materials in 1896. Cosmic Rays were discovered by balloon enthusiast Victor Hess in August 1912. He went almost 5.5km up in a hydrogen filled balloon with a balloonist and a meteorologist equipped with an electrometer which could read the level of radiation. This expedition was to determine the source of radiation which was bewildering scientists working on radiation such as Marie Curie who found some radiation registered on their equipment when they removed the source of radiation and even when instruments were shielded by a lead casing. C.T.R. Wilson was also baffled by apparent radiation seen in his cloud chamber, which he had developed to study atmospheric phenomena. One of the first images from Wilson’s cloud chamber –

A cloud chamber is a box containing a supersaturated vapor. As charged particles pass through, they ionize the vapor, which condenses to form droplets on the ions. The tracks of the particles become visible as trails of droplets, which can be photographed. In 1911 Wilson presented his first rough photographs of particle tracks at the Royal Society in London. In 1929 Hans Geiger and Walter Müller developed a gas filled ionization detector that registers individual charged particles and was ideal for studying high-energy cosmic rays. Bruno Rossi further developed the Geiger counter and demonstrated that the Earth’s magnetic field bends incoming charged particle showers. In 1936 Seth H. Neddermeyer and Carl D. Anderson discovered the Muon as most common cosmic particle in cosmic ray showers. In 1938 Pierre Auger observed showers with energies of 1015 eV – 10 million times higher than any known before.

In 1947 Patrick Blackett presented a paper in which he suggested that Pierre Auger emitted by high-energy cosmic rays contributed to the light in the night sky. In September 1952 a simple experiment by Bill Galbraith and John Jelley allowed the first observation of Cherenkov light produced by cosmic rays passing through the atmosphere. By the end of the decade, observation of Cherenkov radiation in the atmosphere had been developed further as a means for studying cosmic rays. I will be looking further at Cherenkov radiation in the coming weeks as I begin research on the historical site of Haverah Park in North Yorkshire, the site of an extensive cosmic ray air shower detection array which led the world for two decades in studies of cosmic rays of the highest energies. Haverah Park array used water Cherenkov detectors. I will also be looking at the cosmic ray detection innovations of Astronomer Royal Sir Arnold Wolfendale

A visit to Malta. Architecturally beautiful, bathed in golden light, the palimpsest of Malta’s history is fascinating to uncover. 20,000 years ago after the last Ice Age, the sea level in the Mediterranean was 130 metres lower than today and Malta was one land mass connected to Sicily.

Due to its geographic location Malta was a contested site for naval and trade powers for hundreds of years, yet before the first empire builders arrived there is no evidence of conflict between communities found at the archaeological sites for the first 5000 years of settlement.

Evidence of first settlers dates to about 5900 BC. These people were hunters and farmers who kept domestic cattle and built temples. The earliest remains found at the Neolithic subterranean temple and burial site of about 7,000 individuals – The Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum – the only known European example of a subterranean ‘labyrinth’ date from about 4000 BC.

The whole system, which in places replicates the architecture of temples above ground, was cut into the limestone using just stone or antler tools. Some of these deep underground chambers are decorated with spiral and chequerboard patterns in red ochre. A highlight of the visit is the acoustic demonstration of a deep resounding echo filling the chamber when someone with a low voice speaks softly into a small, excavated niche. The particular acoustic frequencies measured throughout the chambers suggests a deliberate design and a potentially important cultural role for making music. Archaeologists believe the dead were probably left exposed until the flesh had decomposed and fallen off before the bones were buried in mass graves along with copious amounts of red ochre but so much is unknown.

Photography is not allowed in the labyrinth of tunnels, so I have no images inside the ancient site where so many people were buried, but saw skulls found here, known as the long skulls, at the Museum of Archaeology.

Also at the museum is the famed clay figurine of a ‘sleeping woman’ discovered in the Hypogeum.

The ancient temples and early artworks hint at past cultures we have no way of understanding.

Many figures were found at other temple sites. Although some figures are female and there are many phallic figures, it is not clear of the gender of the ‘fat’ figures some of which appear to allow for interchangeable heads.

The Tarxien Temples complex of megalithic monuments with intricate stonework date to approximately 3150 BC.

In about 3850 BC new settlers arrived, also farming and building temples but after 1,500 years suddenly disappeared from the landscape. New research using carbon dating, pollen from earth cores, tree ring and human bone analysis, and the location of sediment embedded molluscs, suggests a society battling with soil erosion from felling all the trees, subsequent dietary deficiencies, and a major climate catastrophe around 2350 BC, possibly a dust cloud from volcanic eruptions, which may have led to their ultimate demise.

Malta suffered so much war, stretching back hundreds of years, war after war, so many wars, so depressing. A colossal amount of armour, some so intricately detailed, is held at the Grandmasters Palace Museum.

The Phoenicians arrived in Malta around 870 BC from Lebanon, and Malta subsequently came under the control of the ancient city of Carthage as a strategic trading post right up until the Romans take it in 255 BC bringing with them the Roman Catholic religion. A Cathedral was founded in the 12th century (according to legend it was built on the site where the Roman Governor met St. Paul when he was ship wrecked on Malta) was damaged by a huge earthquake in 1693 and rebuilt in the opulent Baroque style.

St. Paul’s catacombs located outside the walls of the ancient city of Melite is a system of underground galleries and tombs dating from the third to the eighth centuries CE.

The Byzantines of Malta fought off an invading Arab army for many weeks but the capital city of Melite fell in 870AD and all inhabitants were massacred. The city was rebuilt as Mdina by the Muslim conquerors. The Normans invaded Malta in 1091 to little resistance and this paved the way for the reintroduction of Christianity. Next came the Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, colonising Malta in 1530. The Order of St John was given Malta as a fief for the annual donation of a peregrine falcon, better known as the Maltese falcon. It was kept and trained in a great hall of the Grandmasters Palace where owls, song birds and other exotic birds were kept.

The Knights ran a strong naval fleet and knew the importance of astronomy for navigation. They established an astronomical observatory at the Grandmaster’s Palace. Also a meridian line, inlaid in marble, ran across the floor of one room with a hole in the ceiling above – noon was marked as the sun crossed the line.

The Order of St John capitulated on the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798. During his week on Malta Napoleon abolished slavery and instigated free education but there were other changes not so beneficial to the population and after two years of French rule an uprising led to Malta becoming a protectorate of the British. The magnificent printing press in the administrative hub of the Grandmasters Palace was manufactured by Londoners Harrild and Sons (founded 1809) of Farringdon.

Malta played a vital role providing a strategic location for hospitals during the first world war and was heavily bombed during the second world war. Discontent on British commitment to supporting Malta’s economy and hikes in imported food prices eventually led to riots by the population and came to a head on 7th June 1919 when British troops fired into the crowd, killing four and injuring 50. Relationship souring, Malta finally gains independence in 1964, becoming a republic in 1974.

While in Malta I was reading Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, a novel that whisks you across time and space as characters inhabit times from the 1453 Ottoman siege of Constantinople to a spaceship escaping future Earth. It resonated with a land whose history is still so present and helped set markers across the centuries to cross reference what was happening in different parts of the world at the same time.

In Cumbria earlier in the year I visited Bewcastle, site of a Roman out post fort. The Anglo-Saxon Bewcastle Cross from the 7/8th century, hewn from a single piece of sandstone stands at 4.5m in the splendid village churchyard of St. Cuthbert’s Church. The head of the cross is missing and the carving very worn but features an intriguing mix of religious and non-religious figures, reliefs and inscriptions in a runic alphabet. The oldest carved sundial in Britain can be seen on the south face of the shaft, this medieval timepiece was carved at a later date, after the cross was erected, and is missing the indicator. From the late 7th century, around when this cross was being commissioned the Byzantines were busy building defence walls around Malta to counter a growing Muslim threat they feared.

Gallery Visits

Pia Östlund Sea of Love at No Show Space. Really enjoyed my visit to this beautifully curated exhibition. So nice to have a gallerist take time to talk about the work. The nature printing explored in this show is an involved process of imprinting dried seaweed under pressure between polished lead sheets, taking latex moulds from the imprints which are then made conductive by coating in graphite and electroplated with copper to make a printing plate. Pia Östlund spent two months at BORCH Editions in Copenhagen, working with the master printers on refining the platemaking process of nature printing. Nature printing is an intaglio printing technique from the mid-19th century that makes it possible to make direct impressions of the surface of natural objects.

Sensory overload at The Cosmic House, a ‘built manifesto for Post-Modernism’. The original 1840’s residence has been remodelled by Charles Jencks into a complex system of symbols that embrace the creation of the universe, the rotation of the Earth around the Sun, day and night, the seasons, the elements, the understanding of science, and the history of architecture.

It’s like entering a kaleidoscope, mirrors everywhere, shifting perspectives, glimpses through to other spaces, optical illusions, and all saturated with vibrating colour.

The latest addition to the house is the museum gallery, which Jencks designed but did not live to see completed, with mirrored ceiling plaques on all my favourite things like magnetic fields, solar flares and gravity waves. Amazing place to visit.

There is currently an exhibition THE WORLD TO ME WAS A SECRET: CAESIOUS, ZINNOBER, CELADON, AND VIRESCENT by Tai Shani here whose theatrical colourful works suit this setting.

Tags Anthony Doerr, Belly of a rock, Bewcastle Cross, Bruno Rossi, buttons, C.T.R. Wilson, carbon, carbon dating, carbon-14, Carl D. Anderson, Charles Jencks, Cherenkov radiation, Cloud Chamber, Cloud Cuckoo Land, cosmic rays, fossils, Hans Geiger, Haverah Park, Henri Becquerel, HHogsmill Nature Reserve., Instruments of the Anemoi, iron core, Liverpool Book Art, magnetic field, Malta, Maltese Falcon, Marie Curie, miyake events, muon, Open Studios, Pia Östlund, Pierre Auger, radiation storm, radical pair, sea snail, Seth H. Neddermeyer, shells, Sir Arnold Wolfendale, skulls, sleeping woman, solar flare, solargraph, St Paul's catacombs, Tai Shani, Tarxien Temples, The Cosmic House, time crystals, tree rings, Victor Hess, Walter Müller, Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum

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objects in motion

June 6, 2024 //

I am excited to be planning a visit to Haverah Park, the site of a cosmic ray air shower detection array consisting of water Cherenkov detectors distributed over an area of 12 km² on the Pennine moorland, North Yorkshire. The experiment was operated by University of Leeds for 20 years, and was switched off in 1987. During its lifetime many 1000’s of extensive air showers were recorded including four exceptional ones of such size that the cosmic rays that generated them must have had energies greater than 10eV. These particles are the highest energy form of radiation known to exist anywhere in the universe and their origin is one of science’s greatest mysteries. Having reimagined The Absolute Hut seen at Hartland Magnetic Observatory for the exhibition A Stone Sky I am hoping a future project may be the reimagining of the huts from Haverah Park.

The exhibition Carbon: under pressure at Science Gallery Bengaluru is still running and I am so proud to have my work Cosmic Chiasmus: crossing the universe included in this amazing show. This 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. Cosmic rays go through a violent process of creation, transformation and decay. From the heart of stars or the depths of black holes these particles power across the universe with unimaginable energy colliding with life on Earth and triggering other processes such as cell mutation, computer data corruption and carbon-14 formation.

I am fascinated to learn more about cosmic magnetism and its influence on the development of early life.

The Universe is magnetic. From stars to galaxies to intergalactic space, magnetic fields thread the cosmos. Yet the origin of cosmic magnetism is still unknown, so astronomers are attempting to make maps of the magnetic fields inside massive galaxy clusters to determine if cosmic magnetism came from the early origin of the universe or developed over time. If it is discovered that there is an alignment of fields across the universe this would point to a primordial source of the cosmic magnetic structure rather than a slow emergence from seed magnetic fields. Understanding the origin of cosmic magnetism may give clues to the development of life on Earth and the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. Only planets with a magnetic field have an atmosphere and offer protection from most radioactive cosmic rays.

Those cosmic rays that do penetrate the atmosphere may have influenced the development of early life. Chirality, also known as handedness, is the existence of mirror-image versions of molecules. Like the left and right hand, two chiral forms of a single molecule reflect each other in shape but don’t line up if stacked. All known life-forms show specific chiral properties in chemical structures as well as macroscopic anatomy, development and behaviour. The sugars that make up DNA, for example, are all right-handed. The amino acids that make up proteins are all left-handed. It is not clear how this asymmetry evolved but one theory suggests that magnetic surfaces on minerals in bodies of water on the primordial Earth, charged by the planet’s magnetic field, could have served as “chiral agents” that attracted some forms of molecules more than others, kicking off a process that amplified the chirality of biological molecules.

Another theory proposes that the influence of cosmic rays on early life may explain nature’s preference for a uniform “handedness” among biology’s critical molecules. Before life emerged on Earth, self-replicating molecules were slowly evolving beneath a constant shower of energetic particles from space. Researchers believe that cosmic rays with the ability to penetrate matter were potentially colliding with chiral molecules on Earth and everywhere else in the universe. These tiny differences in the mutation rate would have been most significant when life was beginning and the molecules involved were very simple and more fragile. Under these circumstances, the small but persistent chiral influence from cosmic rays could have, over billions of generations of evolution, produced the single biological handedness we see today.

Chirality is also seen in the spiral of a mollusc shell. I am in the process of finishing the sculpture shell for belly of a rock a hybrid work of chemical conversations at the intersection of the animate and inanimate, inspired by Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics story The Spiral. Paper clay with crushed mussel shells.

My most recent video installation Orbital shown in Life Boat at APT Gallery focused on the potential risks to technology and life on Earth from extreme solar storms.

The following month, a barrage of large solar flares and coronal mass ejections jettisoning clouds of charged particles and magnetic fields, travelling at speeds up to 3 million mph toward Earth, created the strongest solar storm to reach Earth in two decades, and possibly one of the strongest displays of auroras on record in the past 500 years. There were even perfectly clear skies to view this extraordinary event, yet I missed it. So envious of all those who did get to see the displays of Aurora at such low latitudes. I am hoping there will be another chance to see the Aurora in the UK during this current year of peak solar activity, but not so dramatic a storm as to cause an ‘internet apocalypse’.

Gallery Visits

Andrea V. Wright Eyes of Skin at Thames-side Studios Gallery curated by Thorp Stavri. This exhibition explores the permeability and interactions between the body and architecture and the tensions arising from the ever-changing precariousness of our external and internal constructed environments. It was good to be able to chat with Andrea about her influences from fashion tribes and processes such as casting skins from buildings tumbling into ruins and tactics to avoid being vulnerable working in remote locations.

Holly Birtles and Charly Blackburn in Bog Bodies at APT Gallery. interrogate the complexities of wetland mysteries in the Thames Estuary and the Fenland Marshes exploring life, death, and metamorphosis through ceramics and photography. The Bog preserves the body in death enabling us to travel back in time as far as the Mesolithic period. Conditions inside the bog are acidic. They are perpetually wet, entangled with plants and peat, muddy and monstrous. A dense soup inhabited by complex ecologies that thrive in the anaerobic surroundings, creating a unique biochemical and physical occurrence that facilitates the mummification of prehistoric humans. This exhibition however, confounds expectations of oozing mud and swampy detritus. These ‘artefacts’ are presented in a pristine white cube setting, there maybe a slight whiff of smoke lingering from the ceramics but all is clean and orderly and the framing is thoughtful with a nice use of colour contrasts between image and frame. Good to be surprised.

SALON FOR A SPECULATIVE FUTURE: HOW TO BE IN THE FUTURE? at Vestry St – Cross Lane Projects with works from Aideen Barry, Quilla Constance, Lisa Chang Lee, Kate Fahey, Young In Hong, Evy Jokhova, Huma Mulji, Koushna Navabi, Monika Oechsler, Rebecca Scott, Jo Stockham. Postulating hope for a better future Rebecca Solnit (in an article in the Guardian, 2016): wrote “Hope is an embrace of the unknown”. Living in times of unprecedented change, uncertainty, she says, has “the power to influence the future”. Taking inspiration from the ‘future thinking’ of speculative fiction and looking at a wide range of fields from science and technology to spiritual, ecological and socio-economic issues, the exhibition highlights multiplicities and the complex interplay at work in global dynamics. The works, individually and collectively, draw on associations from different subjectivities and contested /histories facilitating a space for contemplation and the discussion of positive futures. Strong shift shaping work here that gets under the skin, fake facades, hairy hissing and an AI doctored doctrine, make for an unsettling present from which to speculate on the future.

The Tipping Point at Bell House. The tipping point may arrive seemingly out of the blue as a slight change heralding a new way forward. It can be magical or malevolent. More than 40 artists in six individually curated spaces will examine different kinds of tipping points, both minor and major, literal and metaphorical. Sarah Sparkes and Jane Millar curate The Gowan Room using Octavia Butler’s dystopian novel, ‘Parable of the Sower’, as a point of reference. Jonathan Callan, Chudamani Clowes, Sarah Doyle, Lydia Julien, Marq Kearey, David Leapman, Yair Meshoulam, Jane Millar, Stephen Nelson, Victoria Rance, Alke Schmidt, Lex Shute, Ania Tomaszewska-Nelson, Sarah Sparkes, Sara Trillo, Marianne Walker and Alice Wilson explore a new awareness of change and exchange, a constant shifting of strange identities, the malleability of being, interspecies communication and the strength and vulnerability of community. Imagining new ways to merge; ways to intelligently and sensually live in the flux of a perpetual tipping point. Léonie Cronin curates the Lutyens room as a procession through objects of different artistic beliefs, pointing to new myths, a point of Syncretism where ideas become merged and the old symbols get incorporated into new systems.

Thomas Pausz in Haunted Ecologies at Stanley Picker Gallery. A very interesting show drawing threads of local history together with current urgencies such as sewage pollution of the local endangered chalk stream Hogsmill River. From spirit photography and the dark room experiments of Kingston’s Eadweard Muybridge, to digital manipulation, rendering and 3D scanning – Our perception of contemporary environment and culture is always haunted by spectres of the past and by hopes and visions of the future.

Symbiosis II group exhibition exploring the relationship between image makers, the more-than-human, and alternative photographic processes at Four Corners Gallery organised by London Alternative Photography Collective curated by Hayley Harrison, Melanie King, and Ky Lewis. This exhibition considers the connections between symbiosis and alternative photography, and asks if nature is a collaborator or a commodity in alternative photography processes.

YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND at Tate Modern. The main takeaway from this extensive overview of her pioneering work is the sadness that peace hasn’t been given a chance. The works are very direct, may appear simple in content or execution but cut deep into the human psyche. I particularly liked Half a Room, first presented in 1967, this is a room of objects cut in half and painted white. Ono said of this work “Molecules are always at the verge of half disappearing and half emerging…somebody said I should put half a person in the show. But we are halves already.” Another piece, Helmets (pieces of sky) from 2001 invites the audience to take a piece of the sky, which she sees as a hopeful symbol of limitless imagination. Jigsaw pieces of the sky are suspended in German army helmets, and although dispersed, offer the possibility of hope that they can be put back together through collective healing. Many works are participatory. A wall for drawing around your own shadow to create an entanglement of bodies. A boat to add your own wish to an ocean of wishes for the future.

Geographies of Print final iteration of Without Horizon, Without Shore at Thames-side Studios Gallery. Geographies of Print is a collective group created by artists Victoria Ahrens, Carol Wyss and Victoria Arney in 2020. This collective looks to explore and challenge notions of print within wider contemporary discourse and practice. The artists fully inhabit the given space with dramatic large scale pieces, that interact and collaborate to create an exciting and cohesive exhibition. Blocks of colour flash between a maze of hanging muslin panels where etchings of impenetrable blacks and misleading undulations recall both mountain paths and the shadowy mazes of ancient cities. Emotive live music improvisation by Jim Howard (trumpet and electronics) and Julie Walkington (bass) accompanied Victoria Arney’s film reflecting on the epic journey of migrating birds. Landscapes of the mind and the body, a birds eye view and the internal geology of the Earth are beautifully explored.

Tags Andrea V Wright, aurora, aurora-borealis, Belly of a rock, carbon, carbon-14, Carol Wyss, Charly Blackburn, chirality, Chudamani Clowes, cosmic magnetism, cosmic rays, Haverah Park, Holly Birtles, Jane Millar, Jo Stockham, Kate Fahey, Lisa Chang Lee, Marianne Walker, northern-lights, orbital, Sarah Sparkes, science, Science Gallery Bengaluru, solar storm, Thomas Pausz, Victoria Ahrens, Victoria Arney, Victoria Rance, Yoko Ono

Categories Uncategorized

Order (and randomness)

June 3, 2023 //

I am very grateful to a-n The Artists Information Co for awarding me a professional practice and creative development bursary to expand on my research and respond to the many ways Earth’s magnetic field impacts life on earth. The award will be used for a research trip to the remote location of Eskdalemuir Magnetic Observatory and Kielder Dark Skies Observatory. Fingers crossed for an Aurora experience. I will also gain expert tuition in concrete casting and mould making from Anna Hughes and make use of the facilities at The London Sculpture Workshop.

Domain of the Devil Valley Master – work in progress. It is likely that compasses were first used in China to divine an alignment of order and harmony for important sites and rituals. Jade hunters discovered they could also help to keep them from getting lost long before Europeans used them for navigation. The first mention of a south-pointer is in a fourth-century BCE text – The Book of the Devil Valley Master, and it is this that I am referencing in the title of this sculpture. Other references in the work are the rotation of the Earth’s core and geological formations of polygonal prisms. A magnetic domain is a region within a magnetic material in which the individual magnetic strength and orientation of the atoms are aligned with one another and they point in the same direction. The work uses directional magnetic steel stripped of its industrial coating to reveal the jigsaw pattern which comes from rolling single crystals of an iron silicon alloy into thin sheets to minimise magnetic losses for use in industry. The sheets have been sanded, etched, guillotined, treated for rust and sealed.

The Earth’s core is made almost entirely of iron and nickel. Siderophiles are elements that form alloys easily with iron and are concentrated in the Earth’s core. When the Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago from the collision, accretion and compression of matter it was rock all the way through. Heat from the massive violence of formation and radioactive decay caused the planet to get hotter and hotter. After about 500 million years of heating up it finally reached the melting point of iron. As the iron liquified lighter material rose to the surface becoming the mantle and crust and the heavy metals like iron and nickel fell towards the centre becoming the core. The siderophiles that descended into the core are gold, platinum, and cobalt along with around 90% of the Earth’s sulphur. Hence the smelly sulphur vents around the volcanic regions.

Belly of a Rock – work in progress. Making paper clay discs to build the surface of this hybrid sculpture and crushing mussel and oyster shells to use as texture.

The geographic north pole lies in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, covered in shifting sea ice, where the sun rises and sets only once per year. All lines of longitude converge here and hence all time zones. It is known as true north to distinguish it from the magnetic north pole. However, as the Earth’s axis of rotation wobbles slightly in an irregular circle, even this pole is not fixed. The magnetic north pole, also called the magnetic dip pole, is where the planet’s magnetic field is vertical and a compass needle here would dip and try to point straight down. The north and south dip poles are not found directly opposite each other. These dip poles are located by experiment in the field but as they are found in the most remote and harsh regions of the planet they are not easy to track. Also they can move around over considerable distances during each day, tracing out oval shapes as they are acted upon by dynamic electrical current systems of the magnetosphere, which are in turn defined by the activity of the solar wind. There is an equivalent (but fictional) magnetic dipole at the centre of the Earth assigned from global modelling of the geomagnetic field. These geomagnetic poles are an approximation arrived at by reducing Earth’s complex and varied magnetic field to that of a simple bar magnet. The north dip pole lies in Northern Canada, the northern dipole is roughly off the northwest coast of Greenland.

The Absolute Hut – work in progress. This installation is a reimagining of the Absolute Hut at Hartland Magnetic Observatory where monitoring of the Earth’s magnetic field takes place. Topological contours of suminagashi marbling also echo fluid magnetic field lines. Testing scale and alignment in the gallery space. Collecting planks for the north facing wall. Prepping the round window. Suminagashi experiments on different Japanese papers. I want to consider the hut as a sensory hub.

Other exciting news is that APT Gallery have selected a proposal for an exhibition which will take place in March 2024. The exhibition will consider the lifeboat as a metaphor in relation to uncertain times, ecological and social change and shifting landscapes as viewed from the land and the sea. The artists in this group show share an interest in exploring precarity as a site of dynamic transition. I am so happy to be working with these wonderful artists – Rachael Allain, Caroline AreskogJones, Beverley Duckworth, Liz Elton, Kathleen Herbert, Kaori Homma, Anne Krinsky.

In celebration of World Metrology Day, NPL opened Bushy House and gardens to the public. A chance to see and hear about ever more accurate ways of measuring the physical world. Bushy House was the residence of William, Duke of Clarence (William IV) and his mistress Dora Jordan from 1797, and was offered to the Royal Society by Queen Victoria in 1900 as a location to establish The National Physical Laboratory. The impressive apple tree is from an offcut of one from Newton’s home estate. The magnetic laboratory here is concerned with devising and standardising the instruments used by magnetic observatories such as the one at Hartland that I visited last summer. I saw the 1kg sphere of single crystal silicon, with the smoothest polished surface of any made object and notoriously hard to photograph. The application of a strong magnetic field during the crystal growth process reduces contaminants giving a purer silicon crystal. Developments in technology bring new units and definitions of measurements.

From early concepts of number, patterns in nature (symmetry, branching, spirals, cracks, spots, stripes, chaos, flows, meanders, waves, dunes, bubbles, foam, arrays, crystals, and tilings) magnitude, and form came mathematics, meaning subject of instruction. This has evolved into complex theory from an understanding of negative numbers to imaginary numbers which combined with real numbers have been found necessary to describe quantum mechanics.

The colour coding of Saturn’s rings according to particle size used radio occultation to determine the different regions. Radio signals were sent from the Cassini spacecraft during orbits which placed Earth and Cassini on opposite sides of Saturn’s rings. This remote sensing technique measures how the radio waves bend around the matter they encounter to assess the physical properties of a planetary atmosphere or ring system. The purple colour indicates regions where most particles are larger than 5 centimeters. Green and blue shades indicate regions where there are mostly particles smaller than 5 centimeters and 1 centimeter. The white band is the densest region where radio signals were blocked preventing accurate representation in this area. The radio observations showed that all rings appear to have a mix of particle size distribution right up to boulder sizes, with several many meters across.

Gallery Visits

Georgina Sleap Now and here and there together at Cable Depot. A residency undertaken in collaboration with Neil Cheshire, Olive Hardy, Mercedes Melchor, Agnieszka Szczotka, Derek Horton, Farida Youssef and Niamh Riordan. A wonderful installation conjured from simple materials and experimental technology, both analogue and digital that blur the here and there of time and space. Sounds of everyday street noise live from the artist’s Cairo balcony are streamed into the gallery where suspended torches project still slide images onto the wall or inside elongated sculptural forms. A loom for weaving a plain coffin shaped carpet hangs like a hammock next to CCTV recordings of yogic performance while a camera obscura style intervention casts shadows, bringing the local outside in.

The Shape of Things by Clan, a collective of multidisciplinary artists – Caroline Penn, Liz Lowe, Ashley Goldman, Nicky O’Donnell at Gallery 3, a delightful Georgian property in Margate. The artists examine issues of loss, both personal and environmental, that are balanced by ideas of hope and regeneration. A nice use of recycled and sustainable materials including netting from fruit and cable ties.

Beatriz Milhazes at Turner Contemporary. Perfect for a summer’s day at the seaside. Exuberant.

Opening event for the new photography centre at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Interesting to hear about the process Noémie Goudal undertakes to create her ambitious illusionist photographic sculptures such as Giant Phoenix VI from the series ‘Post Atlantica’ which has been acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum for their photography collection, housed in a new dedicated gallery. This work was inspired by her interest in shifting landscapes, the movement of tectonic plates and how landmasses join and separate over millennia. There was also the chance to see her video Inhale Exhale along with behind the scenes footage of her technical team and the scale of the resources involved. Tarrah Krajnak has also had work acquired by the museum and read some of her poetry at the event. Her interests are also in discontinuity, severance and cataclysmic events but on a human scale. Being born from an act of violence she puts her own identity forward to explore power relationships.

Reading

I have really enjoyed the breadth of information delivered so beautifully by Hettie Judah in her book Lapidarium – The Secret Lives of Stones. The character described and stories told of each geological layer, formation, rock and gem brings to life a world often perceived as static, perpetual and dry. This book is a great resource and has been particularly appropriate for me in the run up to the exhibition A Stone Sky with Julie F. Hill as we explore the intimate connections between the rocky planet earth and space.

Tags Anna Hughes, APT Gallery, Ashley Goldman, Beatriz Milhazes, Bell House, Belly of a rock, bursary, Cable Depot, Caroline Penn, compass, directional magnetic steel, Domain of the Devil Valley Master, Earth's core, Eskdalemuir Magnetic Observatory, Gallery 3, geographic north pole, Georgina Sleap, Hartland Magnetic Observatory, Hettie Judah, Jane Millar, Julie F. Hill, Kielder, Lifeboat, Liz Lowe, London Sculpture Workshop, magnetic domain, magnetic north pole, National Physical Laboratory, Nicky O'Donnell, Noémie Goudal, paper clay, Sarah Sparkes, Saturn's rings, shells, siderophiles, silicon crystal, south-pointer, suminagashi, Tarrah Krajnak, The Absolute Hut, Turner Contemporary, Victoria and Albert Museum

Categories Uncategorized

Quantify

May 7, 2023 //

“How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control.” Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

At Hartland Magnetic Observatory and other magnetic observatories around the world solar activity is examined daily and forecasts are given if this is likely to have any geomagnetic effect on Earth. The main geomagnetic field is also constantly changing due to convection flows and waves in the Earth’s core. As this change cannot be predicted, uncertainty slowly increases over time.

Most of my work at the moment is towards the exhibition A Stone Sky, with Julie F. Hill at Thames-side Studios Gallery later in the year. Very excited to be working alongside Julie and to have space to be ambitious in scale.

The Absolute Hut installation, reimagining the magnetic observatory room, will be a combination of planning to build the structure and unpredictability through processes used for the surfaces. Measuring for the north facing wall to be built in sections for easier transportation. Testing scale and coverage of field contour shapes cut in copper with a plasma gun.

I am hoping the north wall structure can be made up soon and the boards attached. I will then keep it outside facing north until the exhibition in an attempt to grow some moss on its surface. I have only had some very small success so far growing moss, despite trying a new culture recipe and being very diligent misting every morning and evening.

The topological contours of suminagashi marbling, which also echo fluid magnetic field lines, have inspired me to experiment with this idea for The Absolute Hut roofing. I have bought a sumi ink stick in whiteish green, an ink grinding stone and some verdigris pigment from Cornelissen in preparation to try this idea out. In this process the magnetic field lines appear embedded into the fabric of the hut that monitors (senses) the emanations from the Earth’s core.

Through the north facing window of The Absolute Hut, The Azimuth Obelisk (Obelisk of sedimentary knowledge) will be viewed. The sculpture is formed by tearing, drilling and layering sheets of paper. As sedimentary rocks build over time, so the obelisk has a lot of time invested in its making and conceals the history of past events in the hidden layers of the recycled prints and drawings.

I am still working on etching the Directional Magnetic Steel pieces. It can be a frustrating process as some batches work well and some do not etch well at all but come out dull and patchy and I’m not sure why. My idea was to use these pieces to draw a line across the gallery floor signifying the westward drift of the magnetic field from geographical north but now I am thinking more about mapping out a spiral shape in shaped pieces to echo the rotation of the Earth’s molten core.

All information about the Earth’s core has come from studying seismic data, analysis of meteorites, lab experiments with temperature and pressure, and computer modelling. Seismometers convert vibrations due to seismic waves into electrical signals. The velocity and frequency of seismic waves changes with pressure, temperature, and rock composition. The discovery that Earth has a liquid layer beneath the crust and a solid inner core has come from detailed analysis of the different types of waves that pass through the body of the Earth. Looking at the composition of meteorites, fragments of asteroids, formed about the same time, and from about the same material, as Earth provides clues to what minerals the core might contain. Diamond anvil cells are instruments used to recreate the pressure existing deep inside the planet by squeezing materials between two diamonds surfaces. A combination of this data is used to in complex computer modelling programs resulting in detailed animations of the geodynamo, a process powered by the convection of heat in the outer core along with the rotation of the planet.

Also a few more layers of papier mâché have been applied to the sculpture that will house a screen with video for the work Belly of a Rock.

Other work in the research stage looks at the first use of a magnetic compass, the cardinal points of navigation and the compass predecessor the wind rose.

In classical antiquity, a time stretching from Homer to the early middle ages, geographic orientation usually referred to landmarks or astral phenomena to determine direction. Eos meaning dawn, and Hesperus, evening were named for sunrise and sunset with north (arctos) being marked by the constellation Ursa Major and later the Pole Star. The winds also became associated with direction, and named in accordance with their qualities such as hot and humid or cold and dry. In Greek mythology Astraeus, the god of dusk, and Eos, the goddess of dawn, gave birth to many sons of the twilight including the Anemoi, the four gods of the winds, each ascribed a cardinal direction. Boreas being the god of the cold north wind, Notus the god of the hot south wind, Eurus from the east and gentle Zephyrus from the west.

The number of points on a wind rose began with the four cardinal points which were added to and refined over time. The winds were often given names that referred to a particular locality from where they seem to blow, so different places came up with various local names. Aristotle designed an asymmetrical 10 point wind rose which was later refigured by Timosthenes who is credited with inventing the system of twelve winds and using this more for navigation than for “the study of things high in the air.“

Classical wind roses were eventually replaced by the modern compass rose during the middle ages.

The “Vatican table” is a marble Roman anemoscope dating from the 2nd or 3rd Century CE, held by the Vatican Museums. Usually an anemoscope would be topped with a weather vane. Divided into twelve equal sides, each one is inscribed with the names of the classical winds, both in Greek and in Latin.

At a quantum scale, all matter is underpinned by uncertainty. My fascination with particle physics began from simply wondering what everything was made of when you looked really closely. I looked up ‘fundamental building blocks of the universe’ and was blown away by this mysterious other world, so far away in terms of scale I can comprehend, yet a part of me and everything I interact with.

Quanta is a discrete unit that cannot be divided. Quantum physics is the study of energy and matter at the most fundamental level. The chemical reactions in a birds eye that allow it to ‘see’ Earth’s magnetic field involves the quantum entanglement of radical pairs of electrons. These electrons are excited by light, particularly the blue of twilight.

Photography was the first available demonstration that light could indeed exert an action sufficient to cause changes in material bodies. William Henry Fox Talbot

The subject of the photograph (the sun) has transcended the idea that a photograph is simple a representation of reality, and has physically come through the lens and put it’s hand onto the final piece. Sunburn Chris McCaw

This month NASA announced a new planetary defence strategy to protect Earth from an asteroid impact. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) on 11th October 2022, changed the orbit of the Dimorphos Asteroid in the first full-scale demonstration of asteroid deflection technology.

This marks humanity’s first time purposely changing the motion of a celestial object.

“An asteroid impact with Earth has potential for catastrophic devastation, and it is also the only natural disaster humanity now has sufficient technology to completely prevent,” Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defense officer. First any potential collision objects must be identified. This will be the job of the Near Earth Object Surveyor, along with ground-based optical telescope capabilities, to find the still undiscovered population of asteroids and comets that could impact our planet.

A magnetometer is being sent on an eight year journey to Jupiter. It was launched this month from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.

ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) has magnetic and electric field sensors on the end of the magnetometer boom. The boom is folded in three parts and packed against the side of the spacecraft for launch. Once unfolded in space, the sensors will extend clear of the main body of the spacecraft, allowing very accurate measurements without magnetic interference from the spacecraft itself.

The boom’s instruments will measure Jupiter’s magnetic field, its interaction with the internal magnetic field of Ganymede, and will help study the subsurface oceans of the icy moons.

Ganymede is the only moon in the solar system known to have its own magnetic field. The magnetic field causes auroras, which are ribbons of glowing, hot, electrified gas, in regions circling the north and south poles of the moon. Because Ganymede is close to Jupiter, its magnetic field is embedded in, or lies within, Jupiter’s magnetic field.

The discovery of the moons orbiting Jupiter by Galileo Galilei in 1610 was the first time a moon was discovered orbiting a planet other than Earth. The discovery eventually led to the understanding that planets in our solar system orbit the Sun, instead of our solar system revolving around Earth.

Gallery Visits

Peter Doig at The Courtauld. My highlights were the luminous moons, moon bathing and an etching of a cave.

Jitish Kallat Whorled (Here After Here After Here) at Somerset House had a romantic premise with a prosaic aesthetic. I love the concept and the theory and it’s certainly a jarring juxtaposition to be directed to celestial destinations by motorway signage. Routes through the work map circular movements through space and time. Is this the Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy?

Mike Nelson Extinction Beckons at Hayward Gallery.

The impact is in the SCALE. Punchdrunk meets abandoned engineering.

Tags Anemoi, Aristotle, asteroid, Belly of a rock, Chris McCaw, copper, directional magnetic steel, Etching, Ganymede, geomagnetic, Hartland Magnetic Observatory, Jitish Kallat, Julie F. Hill, Jupiter, magetometer, magnetic compass, Mike Nelson, moon, moss, NASA, obelisk, Peter Doig, quantum, Rebecca Solnit, seismic, solargraph, suminagashi, Thames-side Studios Gallery, The Absolute Hut, Timosthenes, William Henry Fox Talbot, wind rose

Categories Uncategorized

Affect

March 6, 2023 //

Really pleased with the results I am getting from the new batch of directional magnetic steel sent from Union Steel Products. These are coming out better than in previous tests.

Norman P. Goss invented grain-orientated steel in 1934. It was produced through a two-stage cold rolling process with intermediate annealing between the cold rolling stages. Grain-oriented electrical steel enabled the development of highly efficient electrical machines, especially transformers. Today, the magnetic cores of all high-voltage high-power transformers are made of grain-oriented electrical steel. The strong preferred crystallographic orientation is known as a Goss texture.

When I receive the electrical steel it has a grey insulation coating which has been applied to both sides of the sheet to avoid eddy currents between the stacked sheets when used in a transformer core. I am removing this coating by sanding. I then etch the sheets in copper sulphate solution for 20 minutes. The plate must be dried very quickly when it is taken out of the etching bath. I then lightly polish and wax the surface. Some detail is lost quite quickly and areas can become muddy after etching so I still need to experiment a little more with alternative cleaning and sealing methods.

A previous batch had a different coating that proved impossible to remove cleanly even with the most extreme methods. This new batch has two different types of sheet which have a slightly different pattern to reveal. It is quite hard work but a fascinating material to experiment with.

I have been considering using the Directional Magnetic Steel Pieces in some form of suspended sculpture as movement causes the surface to catch the light revealing the patterned surface of this material. I might use it to mark the line of declination across the gallery floor from True North to Magnetic North at the time of installation.

Thinking about moving sculptures –

Imagine holding Einstein’s attention for the forty minutes it takes your work to revolve. A Universe by Alexander Calder 1934, painted iron pipe, steel wire, motor, and wood with string. One of the first artists to explore kinetic and motor driven sculpture, expanding drawing into 3D and painting into motion. A nice intro to Calder from 2016 – The Universe of Alexander Calder with Dara Ó Briain.

Work continues on the Azimuth Obelisk with the construction of the metal frame to support the structure and hold the layered paper sheets. Thanks to Giles Corby of the London Sculpture Workshop for getting to grips with my diagrams and welding the frame. The frame is made in three interlocking parts to distribute the weight and make for easier storage and transportation. This sculpture is a response to the concrete obelisk erected in 1955 at Hartland Magnetic Observatory, near the site’s northern boundary as a permanent azimuth mark. It is viewed via a theodolite through a window in the north wall of the Absolute Hut, its azimuth being 11º27’54” E of N and marks the point from which the magnetic north pole is tracked as it drifts westwards.

The British Bryological Society celebrates its centenary this year, promoting the study of mosses and liverworts. I have been searching their website for clues on growing moss. Most of the information is on the identification of mosses but I did find a useful downloadable pdf of The Moss Growers Handbook by Michael Fletcher. No mention of liquidising moss with yoghurt as a starter culture though.

Gathering moss, liquidising with yoghurt and painting on to reclaimed old boards.

I made a rough model of The Absolute Hut to work out how many boards I will need for the north facing wall to try and grow moss on. I like that it turned out looking like a bird house as inside will be video exploring the magnetoreception of birds. This work is a reimagining of the Absolute Hut at Hartland Magnetic Observatory where monitoring of the Earth’s magnetic field takes place.

Some speculation on human magnetoreception:

Neurons send information electrochemically around the body. The signals they send are called action potentials which is a temporary shift from negative to positive within the cell caused by certain ions entering the cell. Research has proven that some animals can sense the magnetic field via cryptochrome molecules in the retina which trigger action potentials. New studies have been carried out looking at iron particles (Fe₃O₄) found in the brain using supersensitive magnetic sensors to read the brain’s magnetic field. Receptor cells containing crystals of magnetite could register changes in magnetic fields and report this information to the brain.

One study suggests that it could be possible for the magnetic field in one animal’s brain to transmit information to another animal’s brain by triggering action potentials creating the same thoughts and emotions. There have been experiments with rats and fruit bats which claim brain to brain communication has occurred. Alpha waves in the human brain have been shown to respond to magnetic fields. Alpha waves are always present, but are more prominent when at rest. The experiment, carried out at Caltech, mimicked how a person might experience the Earth’s magnetic field when turning their head.

Maybe putting our heads together can exchange thoughts telepathically.

I have taken the contour lines from a publicly available World Magnetic Model Field Map as a framework for layering in the video work on bird magnetoreception.

An early frosty morning captured the sun melting the ice on the lens of the spy cam in the garden.

I have built the protective box frame for the monitor that will be inside the mollusc/rock sculpture Belly of a Rock. Thanks to Pete next door for cutting the wood for me. I plan to build the shape up with mesh covered in paper clay. I have had the idea to make small circular paper clay clumps with swirls of crushed shell on each one and build the form up from these. I have been given a lot of oyster shells and have collected mussel shells which I have tested crushing with a pestle and mortar.

The drift of the magnetic North pole was first recorded in 1831 and historically would wander between 0–15 km a year but since the 1990’s it has sped up to drift 50–60 km a year. Tracking changes in the magnetic field can tell researchers how the iron in Earth’s core moves.

Earth’s magnetic field is created in the swirling outer core. Magnetism in the outer core is about fifty times stronger than it is on the rocky surface of the Earth. At the centre of the Earth is the inner core which is divided into eastern and western hemispheres. In the inner core, the temperature is so high, materials lose their permanent magnetic properties as the atoms are so thermally excited they can no longer align to a magnetic point. This is known as the Curie temperature.

The hemispheres of the inner core have distinct crystalline structures and the western hemisphere seems to be crystallizing rapidly whereas the eastern hemisphere may actually be melting. Geoscientists have also recently discovered that the inner core has an inner core. A radical geologic change about 500 million years ago may have caused this inner inner core to develop. Here the crystals are oriented east-west instead of north-south and are not aligned with either Earth’s rotational axis or magnetic field. The inner inner core crystals may have a completely different structure to the hexagonal close-packed (HCP) phase of iron that is stable only at extremely high pressure and so may exist at a different phase.

ESA’s three-satellite Swarm mission was launched in 2013 to monitor Earth’s magnetic field by measuring magnetic signals from Earth’s core, the crust, oceans, ionosphere and magnetosphere. Using data from the Swarm mission, scientists have discovered energy generated by electrically-charged particles in the solar wind, which can be disruptive to communication systems, flows asymmetrically into Earth’s atmosphere towards the magnetic north pole more than towards the magnetic south pole. They have also discovered a completely new type of magnetic wave that sweeps across the outermost part of Earth’s outer core every seven years. These magnetic waves are likely to be triggered by disturbances deep within the Earth’s fluid core. Research suggests that other such waves are likely to exist, probably with longer periods.

Geomagnetic jerks are sudden powerful waves that occur about every three to 12 years and are not consistent across the globe. It seems these jerks originate from rising blobs of molten matter that form in the planet’s core up to twenty five years before the related jerk takes place. The current findings from Swarm are part of a long-term project to predict the evolution of the geomagnetic field over the coming decades.

Polarised light is when the waves of electric and magnetic fields vibrate preferentially in certain directions. This can happen when light bounces off a reflective surface like a mirror or the sea. It can also happen in space as starlight travels through gas and dust clouds. Polarisation carries a wealth of information about what happened along a light ray’s path and astronomers can study the physical processes that caused the polarisation.

The Milky Way is filled with a mixture of gas and dust from which stars are born. Cosmic dust grains are almost always spinning rapidly, tens of millions of times per second, due to collisions with photons and rapidly moving atoms. The spinning dust grains become aligned to the direction of the magnetic field. They emit light at very long wavelengths from the infrared to the microwave domain which comes out vibrating parallel to the longest axis of the grain, making the light polarised.

Visualisation of data from ESA’s Planck satellite shows the interaction between interstellar dust in the Milky Way and the structure of our Galaxy’s magnetic field. Polarisation-sensitive detectors were able to capture the data as interstellar dust grains tend to align their longest axis at right angles to the direction of the magnetic field resulting in light emitted by clouds of gas and dust being partly ‘polarised’. Researchers are using the polarised light from interstellar dust to reconstruct the Galaxy’s magnetic field and study its role in galaxy evolution and star formation. From this data it can be seen that across the galactic plane there is a strong regular pattern but in some areas there are tangled features where the local magnetic field is particularly disorganised.

New images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope show star formation, gas, and dust in nearby galaxies with unprecedented resolution at infrared wavelengths. NGC 1433 is a barred spiral galaxy with a particularly bright core surrounded by double star forming rings. For the first time, in Webb’s infrared images, scientists can see cavernous bubbles of gas where forming stars have released energy into their surrounding environment.

The Observable Universe 2018 by Pablo Carlos Budasi. The furthest we can see is the faint glow from the cosmic microwave background emitted 13.8 billion years ago.

From Earth we become the centre of the eye that gazes out but we have no idea of the full size of the universe or if we are embedded in a multiverse.

The unobservable universe makes up the vast majority, around 95% of the universe. Zero, a symbol to mark nothing, sits on the boundary between absence and presence indicating what might have been or might come to be. Where we thought there was nothing we have found so much.

Gallery Visits

Preconscious Landscape at Exposed Arts Projects – an interesting space for arts based research projects. Artists: Lynne Abrahamson, Gabriele Beveridge, Matilde Cerruti Quara, Konstantinos Giotis, Sotiris Gonis, Ramona Güntert, Raksha Patel, Hamish Pearch, Anna Perach, Chantal Powell, Candida Powell-Williams, Paloma Proudfoot, Aziza Shadenova, Holly Stevenson, Maro Theodorou, Adia Wahid & Meng Zhou all grapple with an unresolvable psychoanalytic question: what does it mean for the conscious mind to try to understand its own preconsciousness?

Richard Mosse Broken Spectre at 180 The Strand. Seventy minutes of emotionally uncomfortable yet beautifully riveting viewing. Endless overwhelming destruction. Burnt forest. Subterranean fires. Intensive cattle farming. Aggressive gold mining. Wide wide screen images that slip between dreamlike garish colour and chilling monochrome with a soundtrack that sounds like the forest itself crying. The brutal disrespect for the land, the non-human and the people of the Amazon rainforest captured in heartbreaking detail as it slips through our fingers. Having been looking at moss recently the large photographic works at the entrance to the film come across very moss like and emphasises the micro and macro nature of the world.

Cable Depot presents Insert Coin, a project by Bob Bicknell-Knight exploring predatory monetisation practices within video games, specifically loot boxes, and the ongoing insertion of gambling mechanics into virtual experiences. Tapping into our desires and the addictive thrill of winning Bob Bicknell-Knight invites us across the digital divide into a luminous world of pixels and 3D printing. I was delighted to win an island. Here everything is free so there is no uncertainty and debt to mar the experience.

‘As our physical lives are becoming increasingly gamified the game industry has, for almost twenty years, been inserting ways of gambling real world money into video games. From purchasing extra lives to play another level in Candy Crush to buying new cosmetic options for your guns in Call of Duty, spending money within video games has become increasingly prevalent.

One of the most prevalent and destructive forms of monetization are loot boxes, consumable virtual items that are bought within video games which can be redeemed to receive a randomised selection of further virtual items, ranging from simple customization options for a player’s avatar or character to game-changing equipment such as weapons and armour. As the items are randomised players have previously spent thousands of pounds attempting to gain specific products in different games. As these gambling mechanics have become more prevalent, with considerable harm being done to young people and players with gambling addictions, loot boxes are now illegal in several countries, whereas recently the UK government decided that loot boxes will not be regulated under betting laws.‘

Champs Noir curated by Simon Leahy-Clark at Terrace Gallery. A carefully chosen collection of works in black from a great catalogue of artists. Featuring: Michael Ashcroft, Bensley and Dipre, Diane Bielik, Andy Black, Cedric Christie, Gemma Cosse, Graham Crowley, A Ee, Nicky Hodge, Mandy Hudson, Michael Kaul, Sarah Ken, Sharon Leahy-Clark, Simon Leahy-Clark, Graham Lister, Brendan Lyons, Alistair MacKillop, Mutalib Man, Enzo Marr, Donna Mclean, Neil Metzner, Jane Millar, Josh Mitchell, Jost Munster, Stephen Palmer, Kasper Pincis, Andrew Seto, Peter Suchi, Sally Taylor, Chris Tosic, Mark Wainwright & Tom Wilmott. Selected image: Jane Millar: Test Bed, ceramic media, 12cm diameter, 2019.

Julie F Hill Earth, Water, Night at The Stone Space

We so often look out at the night sky forgetting it is gazing back at us.

‘… The [pool] is the very eye of the landscape, the reflection in water the first view that the universe has of itself …’ —Gaston Bachelard,

Holding the poetic and alchemical in contrast to the objective and scientific, astronomical data of deep space folds into Earth’s deep time. Light and shadow gather in pools of water, forming images that suggest consciousness is a fundamental property of all matter.

Beautiful and contemplative works capturing the milkyness of the Milky Way caught in the folds of the night sky; distorted reflections rippling across dark pools; illusory depths oscillating between dimensions.

Sam Williams Deep in The Eye and The Belly (Part One) at San Mei Gallery. It was a busy night at the opening and I didn’t take any photos. There was a large projection on one wall and two other films showing on monitors with headphones. The work describes stories of cetacean bodies, interlacing actual historical events with speculative narratives. The camp narration of the main film deliberately jars with the emotive subject matter, but is given context through the supporting films as the protagonist who features across each film is seen reclining wearing feathers and glittery regalia speaking in long drawn and world weary sentences or lamenting the loss of the whale in absurd song from the vantage of a lighthouse.

Reverse Parking at Thames-side Gallery curated by Peter Lamb and Katie Pratt.

Reverse Parking presents seven artists (Gordon Cheung, Will Cruickshank, Cristallina Fischetti, Oona Grimes, Paul Hosking, Peter Lamb and Katie Pratt) whose work explores the duality of reality and the technological sublime. A bold and vibrant show. Good to see some large work from Oona Grimes and to chat with her in the gallery; her battle scenes encompassing battles down the ages coincidentally emerged at the onset of war in Ukraine. Also interesting to hear Katy Pratt discuss her language of abstract painting on the excellent Art Fictions podcast.

…not necessarily in the right order at Stephen Lawrence Gallery takes a playful cue from the Morecambe and Wise sketch with special guest Andre Previn which is embedded in British cultural history. Work from the featured artists (Carol Wyss, Dominic Murcott, Graeme Miller, Dirty Electronics and Dushume) overlaps and layers through still image, sound and projection. Exhibited is the third iteration of Carol Wyss’s giant etchings that expose the inner recesses of the human skull. Here they are made luminous and their sculpted landscapes all the more surreal by the animated light sequences traversing their surfaces.

Reading

Not observant enough to realise I bought the pocket guide version of The Natural Navigator by Tristan Gooley I ended up with an unembellished rather prosaic read with lots of facts and charts and possibly useful information that requires a large investment of dedication to the cause to learn many of these techniques. What was amusing though was finding the section headed Mosses and Lichens opens with the paragraph –

‘There is a commonly held belief that “Moss grows on the north side of trees and buildings.” It does, sometimes, but will also grow on every other side.

He goes on to say that moss doesn’t care about direction, but it does care about moisture. So in the northern hemisphere the side away from the sun is preferred by moss as it retains moisture for longer. Gradient is also important to prevent run off of water. I have tried to prop my planks at as low an angle as possible in the side passage but may need to find somewhere I can lie them down more.

I am enjoying dipping in to Florian Freistetter’s A History of the Universe in 100 Stars. No longer a swathe of uniform twinkling points of light but each star has its own character and story. It starts with 100 stories but we can extrapolate that to consider each of the many billion stars as individuals.

Listening

In Our Time – Superconductivity Excellent guest speakers (Nigel Hussey, Professor of Experimental Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Bristol; Suchitra Sebastian, Professor of Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge; Stephen Blundell, Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford) on this podcast. Superconductivity was a surprising discovery in 1911 by the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes who found that when he lowered the temperature of mercury close to absolute zero and ran an electrical current through it, there was no resistance to the current. Many other materials have also been found to share this property when cooled to a pivotal temperature when the material suddenly enters a different phase and behaves in a completely different way. As water moves from solid to liquid to gas at different temperatures so metals can move between solid, liquid and superconductor. Further research found that a superconductor also expels magnetic fields and this has been exploited in the making of MRI scanners and to speed particles through the Large Hadron Collider.

I also enjoyed hearing how, what were once impossible numbers, called imaginary numbers by Descartes, have turned out to be fundamental and integral to explaining oscillations and the sort of wave like structures in the universe that we encounter when diving into a quantum world.

The Curious cases of Rutherford and Fry – The impossible number

Tags action potentials, Alexander Calder, azimuth, Belly of a rock, Bob Bicknell Knight, Carol Wyss, cosmic dust, curie temperature, directional magnetic steel, electrical steel, ESA, Exposed Art Projects, Florian Freistetter, gathering moss, geomagnetic jerks, Hartland Magnetic Observatory, impossible number, James Webb Space Telescope, Julie F. Hill, Katie Pratt, Magnetic drift, magnetoreception, Michael Fletcher, Norman P Goss, obelisk, Oona Grimes, Pablo Carlos Budasi, polarised light, Richard Mosse, Sam Williams, superconductivity, swarm satellites, The Absolute Hut, The British Bryological Society, The observable universe, Tristan Gooley, World Magnetic Model, zero

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Intellect

January 7, 2023 //

Editing footage for the video Belly of a Rock which will be shown on an old monitor encased in a sculptural hybrid form relating to both mollusc and rock. The giant sea slug of the mollusc family, can derive directional cues from the magnetic field of the earth which is then modified in response to the lunar cycle. It orients its body between north and east prior to a full moon. In the slug’s nervous system, four particular neurons are stimulated by changes in the applied magnetic field, and two are inhibited by such changes suggesting that the animal uses its magnetic sense continuously to help it travel in a straight line.

The Earth can be divided into the inner core, the outer core, the mantle, and the thin crust. The outer core is about 1,367 miles thick and mostly composed of liquid iron and nickel. It is very malleable and in a state of violent convection. The churning liquid metal of the outer core creates and sustains Earth’s magnetic field. At the boundary between the inner and outer core temperatures can reach 6,000° C which is as hot as the surface of the sun. The inner core is a dense ball of mostly iron, but with a temperature above the melting point of iron, it is not liquid or even molten. Intense pressure from the rest of the planet and its atmosphere prevents the iron inner core from melting as the iron atoms are unable to move into a liquid state. It could be described as a plasma behaving as a solid. The inner core rotates eastward, like the surface of the planet, but it’s a little faster, making an extra rotation about every 1,000 years. Geoscientists think that the iron crystals in the inner core align north-south, along with Earth’s axis of rotation and magnetic field and are arranged in a hexagonal close-packed pattern. The orientation of the crystal structure means that seismic waves travel faster when going north-south than when going east-west. Seismic waves travel four seconds faster pole-to-pole than through the Equator.

The Earth is still cooling and as it does so, bits of the liquid outer core solidify or crystallize causing the solid inner core to grow by about a millimetre every year. The growth is not uniform, it is influenced by activity in the mantle and is more concentrated around regions where tectonic plates are slipping from the lithosphere into the mantle, drawing heat from the core and cooling the surrounding area. The crystallization process is very slow, and further slowed by the constant radioactive decay of Earth’s interior. Scientists estimate it would take about 91 billion years for the core to completely solidify but the sun will burn out in just 5 billion years.

I have nervously passed the cosmic ray detectors over to programmer Jamie. It was hard to let them out of my sight after so much work to get them built but he can’t test the code he has written without them. The Breath of Stars directly interacts with cosmic rays in real time to trigger a digital reaction via a mini computer attached to a block of plastic scintillator and a sensitive photomultiplier. As each particle strikes the plastic scintillator its energy is recorded and a starburst image video relative to the energy released is projected, with the largest images representing the particles with the highest energy.

I am constructing an Obelisk sculpture in response to the concrete obelisk erected in 1955 at Hartland Magnetic Observatory, near the site’s northern boundary as a permanent azimuth mark. It is viewed via a theodolite through a window in the north wall of the Absolute Hut, its azimuth being 11º27’54” E of N and marks the point from which the magnetic north pole is tracked as it drifts westwards. Layers of torn recycled paper are stacked like sedimentary rock that holds clues to the Earth’s magnetic field reversals in its strata.

Copper contours of magnetic field lines have been lacquered to preserve the heat patina from plasma gun cutting. These shapes will be pinned to the north facing mossy wall of the Absolute Hut installation, a reimagining of the Absolute Hut at Hartland Magnetic Observatory. I will also employ a north facing window from which to observe the azimuth mark of the Obelisk sculpture.

A second research visit to RSPB Snettisham, this time to see the pink footed geese (which over winter on the mudflats here) leave their roost at dawn to fly to the fields to feed.

The walk from the car park to the viewing area is over 2km and takes about half an hour to walk. Setting out before first light the weather felt promising but just as I erected the camera tripod the rain came down hard and didn’t stop for the rest of the morning.

Made a second attempt the next morning leaving a little earlier and although it remained dry there was heavy fog over the sea. Not great for filming with my very basic kit but very atmospheric to experience as the geese emerged from the sea mists.

The noise they make is incredible, a constant chattering building to a crescendo of honking calls as they rise from the water and swarm across the sky in their hundreds. They come in waves but look like particles. At one point what sounded like a few gunshots fired out across the bay in the distant darkness. This sudden disturbance set off a slow deep rumble which drew closer accompanied by a low dark cloud growing heavily stronger building and rising as a huge tidal wave of geese rose simultaneously into the sky in panicked disarray. Extraordinary to witness.

Birds are able to “see” Earth’s magnetic field lines and use that information for navigation. Their compass ability comes from a quantum effect in radical pairs, formed photochemically in the eyes. This light sensitive magnetic compass used by birds is affected by the polarisation direction of light. Exposure to blue light excites an electron, which causes the formation of a radical-pair whose electrons are quantum entangled, enabling the precision needed for magnetoreception.

In chemistry a radical is an unpaired electron which is can be highly chemically reactive. In the radical pair mechanism a pair of electrons with opposite spins have a chemical bond. Light can cause the electrons to change spin direction which can break the bond giving the electron a chance to react with other molecules. In magnetoreception two cryptochrome molecules, found in the rod cells in the eyes of birds, each with unpaired electrons, exist in states either with their spin axes in the same direction, or in opposite directions, oscillating rapidly between the two states. That oscillation is extremely sensitive and can detect the weak magnetic field of the Earth. Birds then move their heads to read the spin of the molecules and therefore detect the orientation of the magnetic field.

While in North Norfolk staying in a beach chalet away from light pollution I was able to make a couple of short time lapse videos centering on Polaris.

Birds can detect the slow arc of the sun and the rotation of the constellations across the sky which is imperceptible to humans and allows migrating birds to orient themselves using celestial navigation as well as magnetoreception.

Birds are also able to detect rapid movement such as individual flashes or flickering of a fluorescent light which humans see as a continuous light. Hawks which pursue other birds through dense forests at high speeds, follow the movement of their prey while avoiding branches and other obstacles. To humans travelling at this speed, the fleeing prey, branches and obstacles would just be a blur.

Gallery Visit

Thames-side Gallery ‘The Accurate Perception Available When Our Eye Becomes Single’ is an immersive multi-screen installation evoking the emotional specifics of place (Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast) while exploring the elasticity of time and history. It is an audio-visual collaboration between Richard Ducker (video) and Ian Thompson (sound) with no linear narrative; sound and image are not synchronised, so each viewing is a unique experience. Sarah Sparkes also makes an enigmatic performative appearance both in the video and live in the gallery.

The crashing sea on shingle, open spaces and brutalist bunker architecture of Orford Ness are echoed in the gallery with audio pitched to envelop and resonate but not overwhelm. Nicely done.

Listening

I really enjoy the Inside Science podcasts with Gaia Vince and this one interviewing cosmologist and theoretical physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton about finding evidence that supports her multiverse theory was particularly fascinating.

Multiverses, melting glaciers and what you can tell from the noise of someone peeing

According to Laura the single universe theory is mathematically impossible.

Reading

Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life. A remarkable reveal of an other world, so different yet so entwined with our own. Beautifully clear analogies help to bridge an understanding between human and fungi.

The ability to detect and respond to chemicals is a primordial sensory ability.

In humans when a molecule lands on our olfactory epithelium and binds to a receptor it causes nerves to fire triggering thoughts and emotional responses.

A mycelial network is one large chemically sensitive membrane: a molecule can bind to a receptor anywhere on its surface and trigger a signalling cascade that alters fungal behaviour.

Fungal lives are lived in a flood of sensory information.

They have light receptors, are sensitive to touch and it also looks like fungi may form fantastically complex networks of electrically excitable cells – a potential ‘fungal computer’ using electrical signalling as a basis for rapid communication and decision making which could learn and remember.

Tags absolute hut, axis of rotation, azimuth, Belly of a rock, breath of stars, copper, cosmic ray detector, fungi, Gaia Vince, Hartland Magnetic Observatory, Ian Thompson, inner core, iron, Laura Mersini-Houghton, lithosphere, lunar cycle, magnetic field, magnetoreception, mantle, Merlin Sheldrake, migrating birds, mollusc, mudflats, multiverse, neurons, obelisk, Orford Ness, outer core, pink footed geese, plasma, Polaris, radical pair, Richard Ducker, RSPB Snettisham, Sarah Sparkes, sea slug, tectonic plates

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Abstract relations

September 4, 2022 //

Delighted to announce At a Distance has been selected for The Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity exhibition at the Island Venue, Bridewell St, Bristol.

The Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity is an exhibition which seeks to reframe printmaking as a site of interdisciplinarity – a testing ground for ‘The important work…done at the surfaces between adjacent disciplines’ (Carter, 1998). Motivated by the International Multidisciplinary Printmaking Conference IMPACT 12’s theme ‘Merging and Metamorphosis’, the exhibition aims to trace the metamorphosis of conversations between disciplines. Installed at a former police station in Bristol, the Island Venue hosts art works in an outdoor courtyard, police cells and subterranean motor vehicle storage area. The hybrid exhibition includes works of differing materials, scale and dimensions across installation, sculpture, sound, moving image, digital and post-digital media. Curated by Sarah Strachan and Ayeshah Zolghadr.

At a Distance looks at remote methods of communication and relates this to the mysterious twinning of electrons in quantum entanglement where particles link in a way that they instantly affect each other, even over vast expanses. Einstein famously called this phenomenon ‘spooky action at a distance’. Filmed in Cornwall on 29th March 2019 (the first date when Brexit was supposed to happen) as the iconic Lizard Lighthouse powers up its lamp, solitary figures using semaphore flags sign ‘We Are One’ out across the ocean in the hope the message will be echoed back. Drawing on the physical language of print that embodies touch, separation and mirroring the flags have been printed using hand painted dye sublimation inks applied via a heat press. This process transfers the ink from a paper matrix onto the substrate textile. The image passes momentarily across space in a dematerialized state as vapour before being reformed as its mirror opposite.

In the studio I have been performing some more test etchings of the directional magnetic steel samples. Copper sulphate seems to give a better result than Nitric Acid. I have managed to gently polish the surface with Brasso without losing the crystal pattern and I gave it a coat of clear lacquer as it seems to rust easily. I am enjoying the excavation process.

The pattern comes from rolling single crystals of an iron silicon alloy into thin sheets to minimise magnetic losses for use in transformers.

There is a link here to quite a cool video showing magnetic wall domain movement with a magneto-optical sensor.

Back in the belly of a rock video editing the footage of iron filings movement over rock like surfaces.

Magnetic field reversals are stored in ancient volcanic and sedimentary rocks. The North and South Pole flip at irregular intervals but average about every 300,000 years. The last one was around 780,000 years ago. During a magnetic field reversal, which can take thousands of years, the magnetic field becomes twisted and tangled, and magnetic poles may appear in unexpected places.

Today the Earth is divided into the super hot inner core, the molten outer core, the mantle, and the thin crust.

When the Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago from the collision, accretion and compression of matter it was rock all the way through. Heat from the massive violence of formation and radioactive decay caused the planet to get hotter and hotter. After about 500 million years of heating up it finally reached the melting point of iron. Known as the iron catastrophe this liquifying caused planetary differentiation to occur as lighter material rose to the surface becoming the mantle and crust whereas the heavy metals like iron and nickel fell towards the centre becoming the core. This molten mass also contains elements that dissolve in iron such as gold, platinum, and cobalt along with around 90% of the Earth’s sulphur.

Earth’s main geomagnetic field is constantly changing due to convection flows and waves in the Earth’s core. As this change cannot entirely be predicted, uncertainty slowly increases over time. This fluctuation is monitored using The World Magnetic Model jointly developed by the National Centres for Environmental Information and the British Geological Survey. This is the standard model used by the U.S. and U.K. governments and international organizations for navigation, attitude and heading referencing systems using the geomagnetic field.

Took an early morning drive out to Wilder’s Folly. Built in 1769 by Reverend Henry Wilder as a love token for his fiancée Joan Thoyts – it could be seen from both their residencies. First drone flight over a building and over trees. White doves are now resident and thankfully didn’t seem bothered by the drone.

Such a brilliant day meeting and trying to photograph the beautiful birds of prey at Coda Falconry under the expert guidance of Elliot. Lots of advice on hand just need faster reflexes and possibly a mirrorless camera.

Birds appear to be able to “see” Earth’s magnetic field lines and use that information for navigation. Their compass ability comes from a quantum effect in radical pairs, formed photochemically in the eyes.

Gallery Visits

The extraordinary Joe Banks Disinformation The Rapture Live optokinetic video and sound installation at Cable Depot. A special experience to witness this work which has a heady mix of spirituality and mortality. The human voice stretched to primordial sounds as the flesh transcends its halo of fire.

Wellcome Collection Rooted Beings

A look at the symbiotic relationship between plants, fungi and humans. The exhibition takes on the entanglement of colonial violence, indigenous knowledge and wildness. How different the world would be if we were also autotrophic. Patricia Domínguez holographic sculptures were fascinating – these are four blades of programmable LED lights spinning at speed to create an image. It was very effective. I was also intrigued by the material construction of the Vegetal Matrix exhibition stands which did look a bit like volcanic stone in the low light though they were listed as MDF with acrylic, so a sort of textured paint.

Wellcome Collection Being Human

Yinka Shonibare’s Refugee Astronaut – “The refugee astronaut is the reverse of the colonial instinct of the astronaut – someone who is going out to conquer the world. What you have here is a nomadic astronaut just trying to find somewhere that’s still habitable.”

Wellcome Collection In the Air

The exhibition explores the relationship between the air and earth, from 3.5-billion-year-old fossilised bacteria that first introduced oxygen into the atmosphere to delicate porcelain sculptures of the glaciers that provide a record of the air and our impact on it.

Stromatolites 350m years old – these are fossilised microbial reefs formed in shallow waters from blue-green algae. These cyanobacteria were some of the earliest life forms and their photosynthesis helped produce the oxygen to support the development of other life forms.

International Airspace David Rickard 2019

This work marks the 100 year anniversary of the signing of the Paris Convention which extended land rights upwards to create international airspaces. The vessel contains air collected from the 27 participating countries alongside photographs of where the air was captured.

Panoramic film installation Air Morphologies investigates the materiality and composition of air pollution particles, their causes, effects and morphological agency. The project addresses how art and aesthetics interact with toxic materials; what kind of stories might be deployed through digital technologies; and how geopolitics are located in atmospheric thinking and being. Air Morphologies was initiated during Matterlurgy’s residency on the Science Technology Society program at Delfina Foundation, London funded by Gaia Art Foundation.

Rachael Allain introduced me to the work of Perla Krauze at Cadogan Contemporary. Earthy work presented simply allowing the natural materials to resonate with their own history and materiality. Real volcanic rock rather than a simulation.

“Using graphite frottages from stones and pavements and engraved volcanic rocks from El Pedregal, her paintings are abstract topographies and mappings. Stone is a fundamental material in her practice; linked to memory and durability, it can also be transformed and eroded. The crosshatch patterns in her paintings derive from the lines made in stone cutting, emphasising the transformation of stone from raw material to art object. Described as ‘grayscale tone poems’, Krauze alters and arranges stones to make miniature landscapes, complete in themselves but still referencing their origins.”

Future shock reimagining our near future at 180 The Strand. An immersive dive into a fairground world of light and motion, entertaining with one or two that stood out beyond technical prowess.

My favourite has its roots in the fashion world. Ib Kamara’s stylish film The Queen is Coming, a collaboration with Abdel El Tayeb grabs attention with its sense of transfixing unease created by the film’s characters via their direct expressions and heightened breathing. Anxiety levels are high. Fantastic.

In Neo Surf a collaborative project between filmmaker Romain Gavras and music producer Surkin the sheer scale of the marble quarry landscape emphasised by lanky teens dancing on the cut blocks is extraordinary and brings home a kind of wild abandonment.

Vigil is an installation collaboration between Ruben Spini and musician Caterina Barbieri. A sunset projected onto suspended melting ice creates a fragmented mirror image across the floor while videos with slow-motion footage of levitating bodies, transcendent synths and haunting vocals add to the sense of a slow death drugged on beauty.

Vortex puffs out a smoke ring every so often which is quite fun. Created by Pablo Barquin and Anna Diaz.

Row by Tundra uses the same holographic projectors as I recently saw used by Patricia Domínguez in Rooted Beings. Here they are interpreting generative data from the 12 notes of the chromatic scale.

Other work at Future Shock includes Weirdcore’s lucid dreaming colourscape Subconscious, Lawrence Lek’s self-driving car animation Theta, Actual Objects mildly interactive installation Vicky, NonoTak’s Daydream V6, Ibby Njoya’s colour box experience named after his influential father Mustafa, Vanishing Point from UVA, Object Blue and Natalia Podgorska’s installation of a future where astrologically predicted personality traits are true in What Melissa Said, Ryoichi Kurokawa and the shifting planes of light Topologies by UVA,

In The Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery. New narratives of Black possibility embracing the fantastical not as escapism but as bursting from the constraints of a restrictive society.

The Soundsuits of Nick Cave made as a response to racist violence confer anonymity along with a shamanic power. What a great use of the lace doily. Inspiration for the many doilies I have inherited from my Mum.

Wangechi Mutu collages, Sentinel sculptures and film The End of Eating Everything (featuring Santigold) are drawn from folklore steeped in the grotesque and spectacular. Time to turn from gluttony to restoration.

Lina Iris Viktor sumptuous paintings and Diviner sculptures heavy with gold acting as a conduit between heaven and earth inspired by ancient Egyptian funerary traditions. Her dramatic use of rich glossy black signifies the ‘materia prima’ – from which all creation was formed. Fabulous to see The Watcher, The Listener, The Orator sculptures are hewn from volcanic rock. Black gold of the sun.

Hew Locke’s The Ambassadors, a procession in search of future lands carrying their precious history with them echoing down the ages to Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting of the same name made in times when colonial foundations were being laid.

Cauleen Smith created an intriguing installation Epistrophy which refers to a phrase in literature or music repeated for emphasis. Her archive of associations are elevated into cinematic stardom by a series of live feed CCTV cameras which relay the objects onto the big screens becoming larger than life.

Other vibrant works include those of Rashaad Newsome, Tabita Rezaire and Chris Offili.

Directed to The Swimmers Limb by an attendant who said rather harshly ‘there’s not much to see’ I visited Gallery 31 dedicated to the Somerset House Studio artists where Mani Kambo has designed a ‘psychedelic’ wallpaper on which hang prints by Tai Shani from her feminist mythology series. Pattern, symbols and ritual. Plenty to see.

Carol Wyss The Mind Has Mountains at The Swiss Church. Having seen this powerful work at Ruskin’s House on Coniston Water last year in a very different space – very like the inside of a skull, it was rewarding to be able to see it in a larger space with a little distance which brought alive the mountainscapes within us. A film of the very physical etching, printing and installation process made by Peter Bromley entitled Carol Wyss – In Situ was screened to an amazed captivated audience.

Tags at a distance, Being Human, Belly of a rock, British Geological Survey, Cable Depot, Carol Wyss, Caterina Barbieri, Cauleen Smith, Coda Falconry, David Rickard, directional magnetic steel, electrical steel, Etching, Future Shock, geomagnetic field, Hew Locke, holographic projectors, Ib Kamara, IMPACT 12, In The Air, iron catastrophe, iron core, Joe Banks, Lina Iris Viktor, magnetic field reversal, Mani Kambo, Nick Cave, Patricia Dominguez, Perla Krauze, planetary differentiation, Printmaking, quantum entanglement, Romain Gavras, Rooted Beings, Ruben Spini, semaphore, spooky action, Stromaolites, Tai Shani, The Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity, volcanic rock, Wangechi Mutu, Wellcome Collection, Wilder's Folly, Yinka Shonibare

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