Over the centuries many wind roses have been designed with varying numbers of wind directions from four to thirty-two cardinal points. The contemporary compass rose has its roots in the ancient classification of the winds.

Working on the sculpture series of tablets titled Instruments of the Anemoi after the gods of the winds. Twelve sided non-magnetic concrete tablets suggestive of the plinths that support various instruments used in monitoring the Earths’ magnetic field and the ancient anemoscope “table of the winds” carved in marble around eighteen hundred years ago and inscribed with the Greek and Latin names of classical winds on each of its twelve sides.

Testing an inked collagraph for concrete casting.

The first tablet in the series is cast with a collagraph which takes the commonly used oval shaped compass needle (illustrated in Breve Compendio de la Sphera de la arte Navegar by Martin Cortes 1551) as symbol of the silver fish – wafer thin fish shaped iron leaves used by 11th century Chinese geomancers.

The weather made the casting process a little precarious with the heat drying the concrete faster than ideal. The result has some fine cracks but overall I am pleased with the result. I used a convex glass lens to create a dip for a copper bowl to sit in. The glass had to be dremelled out after unmoulding. It left a very shiny surface. I made the copper bowl by hand at the London Sculpture Workshop. The ‘silver fish’ is cut from a silver gilding sheet.

The next tablet I am working on will contain embedded magnets. An elaborate frame is in construction to suspend the magnets in the concrete while it sets.

I will also add crushed shells as aggregate, so more pounding shells in the garden is necessary.

Continuing work on The Absolute Hut (of action potential). The Absolute Hut is structurally conceived from an amalgamation of features, impressions and functions of the Observing Building and instruments at Hartland Magnetic Observatory in North Devon and the observation huts built in the 18^th century at The Kings Observatory in Kew for meteorological and magnetic observations.

Cutting old featherboard planks to length and hammering them to the frame of the north facing wall with copper nails. These panel sections are now left facing north to gather some moss before the exhibition.

Exciting copper patination tests for the pyramidion to sit on top of The Azimuth Obelisk (of sedimentary knowledge) sculpture. The sculpture expresses the passage of time; made from recycled paper prints and drawings whose history is embedded in the stacked layers, much as the Earth’s geological and magnetic history is secreted into sedimentary strata of rock.

The copper is cleaned first with whiting and ammonia solution. For the test strips I used parcel tape, water based and spirit based varnish, salt and vinegar solution, soy sauce and seaweed plant food. These are applied to the copper which is then placed suspended in a sealed container with a little ammonia. Effects are immediate but I left this overnight.

The next day they are taken from the tank and left to dry.

Both types of varnish interacted with the ammonia fumes, either going dark or puckering and crazing. The parcel tape left a clear band of copper when removed. The salt and vinegar mix gave a light blue patination and the soy sauce and plant food varying greens as copper where it was left raw. The colours continue to develop.

Preparing and patinating the copper triangles I had laser cut to size for the pyramidion. Applying strips of parcel tape to match up at the corners. Setting up a cat defence for drying the plates outside.

Once dry the colours continue to develop. I wanted to spray the surface with Golden archival acrylic spray but it was out of stock everywhere so I got Lascaux archival varnish with UV protection and gave it four light coats. It still continues to change though and flake off a bit adding to the effect of geological, topographical transformation.

I used Sugru, mouldable glue, building it up in stages to fix the sides while the pyramidion is supported in a frame.

Making use of the communal lounge at Thames-side Studios to test some paper template layouts for Domain of the Devil Valley Master. A sculpture using directional magnetic steel laid in a simple spiral which draws upon many references, from the shape of our own Milky Way Galaxy sculpted by vast cosmological magnetic fields, the spiralling molten dynamo generating Earth’s magnetic field, to the inner pathway of spiritual growth and the route to the symbolic omphalos (navel) at the centre of the world where the sky entrance and the underworld meet.

As research for new video work I am looking at experiments performed by Caltech geobiologist Joseph Kirschvink and colleagues investigating human magnetoreception. They found evidence that rotations of Earth-strength magnetic fields produce strong, specific and repeatable effects on human brainwave activity in the alpha-wave band. 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. Although many migrating and homing animals are sensitive to Earth’s magnetic field, most humans are not consciously aware of the geomagnetic stimuli that we encounter in everyday life. Either we have lost a shared, ancestral magnetosensory system, or the system lacks a conscious component with detectable neural activity but no apparent perceptual awareness by us.

Friends from the north visiting London, told me about Haverah Park which is just up the road from where they live in North Yorkshire. The Haverah Park experiment was a cosmic ray air shower detection array consisting of water Cherenkov detectors distributed over an area of 12 km² . The experiment began in 1967 and was operated by University of Leeds for 20 years before closing. During its operation, many thousands of cosmic ray events were recorded including four exceptional events with energies over 10²⁰ eV. The abandoned huts remain and I am very excited about visiting the site to investigate further.

Gallery visits

Anselm Kiefer Finnegans Wake at White Cube Bermondsey – “the artist’s new paintings, sculptures and installations respond to (that is, struggle with and transform) James Joyce’s novel of 1939. Kiefer first read the Irish writer as a young man, devouring Ulysses (1922) and embarking on a slow and spiralling relationship with the later, more exacting, Finnegans Wake. It is a book of circles and echoes, more or less overt or secret; its riverine movement begins in the midst of things, and turns back on itself on the final page.”

The weight and the scale of his work as always is overwhelming.

In my early research wondering what the building blocks of the universe looked like I found myself reading about Quarks and Leptons. I found the language of particle physics to be quite like that of mythology – inhabited with mysterious characters like the charm quark and strange quark, the muon and the tau governed by fundamental forces that cannot be seen or explained other than by their attributes – like the mythical gods. The name “quarks“ was chosen for the three fundamental particles of all matter from a nonsense word used by James Joyce in the novel Finnegan’s Wake:

“Three quarks for Muster Mark!“

Finnegans Wake seeks to inhabit a commonplace but elusive realm of human experience – the language is more like poetry than prose and should be read intuitively – the first sentence of Finnegans Wake completes the end of the last sentence – the book’s circular structure embodies the theories of the 18^th Century philosopher Giambattista Vico, who viewed human history as cyclical along with the natural cycles of the earth such as night and day, life and death, rise and fall. Vico believed that there was a poetic wisdom in legends which gave an insight  into the relationship between the divine, the natural and the human worlds. He was interested in how myths began from common primordial experiences of the forces of nature.

A different kind of immersion – made from light rather than lead. Sarah Sze The Waiting Room at Peckham Rye Station, an Artangel project, is a captivating spectacle of colour and movement. It might be a lesson in attention spans and ubiquitous digital media but it still holds all the joy of being at the centre of a rotating fairground carousel.

“I’ve always been interested in certain times throughout history where our relationship to the way we experience time and space in the world speeds up radically. The invention of the aeroplane, the invention of the train, you see really interesting work coming out of that time, in film, visual arts and writing. We are in the middle of an extreme hurricane where we are learning to speak through images at an exponential pace.” Sarah Sze

Dear Earth at The Hayward Gallery is inspired by artist Otobong Nkanga’s suggestion that ‘caring is a form of resistance’. Bringing together 15 artists from around the world, the exhibition explores the interdependence of ecologies and ecosystems, as well as our emotional connection with nature.  

Day trip to West Wycombe Park; “one of the most theatrical and Italianate mid-18th century buildings in England” surrounded by “the most idiosyncratic 18th century gardens surviving in England”. Sir Francis Dashwood built West Wycombe to entertain, and there has been much speculation on the kind of entertainment he provided for his guests at the house and the nearby hellfire caves.

A surprise discovery in the gardens was The Temple of the Winds, a stucco and flint faced octagonal tower, aligned with its main walls facing north, south, east and west. Erected in 1759 and used as an ice house, its design was inspired by the ancient Tower of the Winds in the Roman Agora in Athens of which Vitruvius wrote

Some have chosen to reckon only four winds; the East, blowing from the equinoctial sunrise; the South, from the noon-day sun; the West; from the equinoctial sun-setting; and the North, from the Polar stars. But those who are more exact, have reckoned eight winds, particularly Andronicus Cyrrhestes, who on this system erected an octagon marble tower at Athens, and on every side of the octagon, he wrought a figure in relieve, representing the wind which blows against that side: the top of this tower he finished with a conical marble, on which he placed a brazen Triton, holding a wand in his right hand; this Triton is so contrived that he turns round with the wind and always stops when he directly faces it; pointing with his wand over the figure of the wind at that time blowing.

Reading

Ursula Le Guin The Winds Twelve Quarters (volume ii) – a collection of short stories, chosen for the title’s relevance to the sculpture series – Instruments of the Anemoi (wind gods).

The story The Stars Below is particularly interesting, written to interrogate the question – what happens to the creative mind when it is driven underground? Le Guin found that ‘you don’t go exploring the places underground all that easily’ as simple symbols took on unexpected divergent meanings and rather than the repression of science or art it was the abyss of the psyche she was fathoming. Le Guin later came across a passage in Jung likening the depths of ego-consciousness to ‘being surrounded by a multitude of little luminosities..[ ].. The star strewn heavens, stars reflected in dark water, nuggets of gold or golden sand scattered in black earth’