Archives for posts with tag: Cosmos: the art of observing space

Secrets

October 6, 2026 //

Honoured to be invited to contribute a postcard for the RWA secret auction which offers the unique chance to purchase original, large postcard-sized works of art by leading figures from the art world. The exhibition Cosmos: the art of observing space which ran at the RWA earlier this year will soon be traveling to Aberdeen Art Gallery. My works Azimuth Obelisk (of sedimentary knowledge), 92 Years Measured in Light and Sun Factor will join the tour.

I have created a digital iteration of the Book of Reversals. Using the scanned images made during my HiResidency at Equivalentbehaviour and a recorded dialogue of the text over the gentle sounds of the sea. The Book of Reversals offers a poetic overview of the formation of planet Earth and its turbulent fluid core that generates an unpredictable but protective magnetic field prone to sudden changes in polarity. Graph readings from magnetometers stationed around the British Isles, which record variations in the Earth’s magnetic field, are screen printed in vertical stripes, either side of the book’s spine, emulating the geological phenomena of magnetic stripes found on the ocean floor. These symmetrical bands, found at mid-ocean ridges, are created as magma rises, cools, and forms new oceanic crust whose magnetic minerals align with Earth’s prevailing magnetic field.

The narrative reflects on the complex dynamics of Earth’s history of polarity reversals, periods of weakened magnetic field, ceaseless interactions between the inner core, the outer core, the mantle and the crust and how its secrets may be discovered.

I am pursuing ideas put forward in my longlisted Artangel proposal to commemorate the pioneering cosmic ray science that took place at during the Haverah Park experiment. This was once home to one of the largest extensive cosmic ray air shower arrays in the world, studying the highest-energy cosmic-rays, until it closed in the late 1980’s. My proposal stated that any sculpture or intervention made where the remains of the huts stand, should take current land use into account.

Having visited the detector huts abandoned across the North Yorkshire moors and seen that sheep are kept on the land here, I have been thinking about how the sheep might experience the night sky.

I had an idea to create a star gazing platform for the sheep, however from just a small amount of research I discovered that there is a fatal illness in sheep which farmers refer to as ‘stargazing’ due to the unnatural position of the sheep’s head looking up. Also, sheep have evolved eyes where the pupil automatically remains horizontal to the ground so that they can spot predators approaching even when they are feeding with their heads down. It seems they might not look skywards unless they are afflicted by a terrible brain disease. Despite this unfortunate discovery, it has been interesting to discover how sheep interact with the world.

Although popular culture often portrays sheep as unintelligent, scientific evidence shows they can form complex social relationships within their flocks and have an extremely good learning ability and memory. Their vision is quite different from ours as they have monocular vision with horizontal, rectangular pupils, giving an impressive panoramic visual field. However with blind spots front and rear, and poor depth perception they can be easily spooked. Although they can see well in low light they are unable to gain sharp focus on distant objects, so even under the dark skies of the moors they might not see the stars clearly if they could look up.

Their vision might be compromised in some instances but it is possible sheep may be sensitive to Earth’s magnetic field. Research has shown that on days when the weather is not so likely to influence how they align their bodies, they appear to show a preferred north-east–south-west alignment which could mean they use magnetoreception for orientation. Similar tendencies have also been observed in cattle, deer, and other mammals.

For work connected to this project I have been doing some preliminary experiments with thread and cardboard boxes. I made some small cardboard models in the shape of the huts but have moved on to thinking of representing the water tanks which were used to record the shower particles as they arrive in a thin disc like structure, sweeping through the atmosphere at nearly the velocity of light. My current thinking is that a series of ‘tanks’ will be wall based with thread woven across the inside marking out the shapes of constellations, potential origins of cosmic rays. The inside of the ‘tanks’ will be lined with rich blue cyanotypes – images made with starlight (the sun). The blue echoes the colour of the scintillating light of Cherenkov radiation which emits photons with short wavelengths and high frequencies, which the human eye sees as blue and violet.

Other ideas in progress include a reinterpretation of the Cosmati Pavement of Westminster Abbey. The mosaic is full of medieval symbolism and sacred geometry and number systems. I am looking to relate ancient symbolism and contemporary iconography to think about changing relationships to fire, water, earth, air and the cosmos. Plato imagined the universe was created as a living creature in the shape of a sphere, perfect and complete in itself. Patterns of Thought author Richard Foster suggests that ‘as our minds become progressively tuned to ecological and global concerns, so the Platonic image of the world as a living creature is re-awakened from its sleep.’

Galleries and other visits

Really enjoyed Annabel Elgar Birds Fly Low at HAPAX Living Room. A speculative reconstruction of a secretive life stemming from finding a pamphlet of instructions for making a spy balloon tucked inside a box of sewing items bought at an online auction. Photographs, keepsakes and other items in the box including a prescription for Thorazine, first administered in the 1950s to treat anxiety, psychosis and agoraphobia, provide intriguing but evasive clues to the owner known only as K.V.M. Faded receipts from a store in Cromarty, Scotland led Annabel to an airfield at Evanton, a launch site for Project Genetrix, a 1950s US programme gathering Cold War intelligence. Surveillance balloons, disguised as weather devices, flew over China, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, with over one hundred launched from Evanton in 1956. The installation at HAPAX includes atmospheric analogue photographs of the items alongside historic photos from the cold war era of the tangled and smashed remains of the ‘spy’ balloons found by the Russians. The pamphlet is sealed away into a frame, not disclosing any of its secrets to the viewer.

A trip to Jena (J in the alphabet odyssey).

“You are simply heavenly/paradisiacal” is a declaration of love to the city of Jena, playing on the name of the nearby popular park called “Paradies” (Paradise). The name stretches back to the Middle Ages. The area along the eastern bank of the Saale River was home to a monastery orchard and lush, idyllic water meadows. Because of its beautiful, fertile green landscape, the locals began referring to this specific stretch of land as “Das Paradies” (The Paradise).

Often called the “City of Light,” Jena in Germany is the home of the world’s oldest operating planetarium and the legacy of optical pioneer Carl Zeiss. Disappointingly, The German Optical Museum (DOM) which holds optical instruments from eight centuries in its globally unique collections, is closed for refurbishment until 2028. The Planetarium, however, has recently reopened after refurbishment, in time to celebrate its centenary. Due to the many train delays in Germany (I was surprised to find the service is constantly delayed) we missed the English version of the planetarium show which is presented just once a week, so ended up seeing the rock and pop space tour which takes you from our solar system to our galaxy, onwards to the wider universe and zooms back in again to find our tiny dot amidst the infinite vastness. The building is very beautiful.

Visited The Goethe Laboratory which is in the former chambers of Jena Botanical Garden’s inspector’s house. It is dedicated to Goethe’s work as a natural scientist, his interests in botany, geology, colour theory and morphology. Between 1775 and 1830 Goethe visited Jena many times, actively involved with the University, establishing museums and collections and working on his experiments in colour theory. Goethe collected and was fascinated by fossils, noticing similarities in the development of bones across species. Through his careful analysis, he succeeded in the (re)discovery of the intermaxillary bone in humans. He had a passion for the deep time of geology and collected lava rocks from Vesuvius and Etna, rock crystals from the Alps, along with limestone and many others.

»It is a pleasant task to explore nature and oneself at the same time, to do violence neither to her nor to one’s own spirit, but to bring both into balance with one another through a gentle reciprocal influence.« – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Proverbs in Prose 1.369

Also visited Schiller’s Garden House where the poet Friedrich Schiller lived and wrote in the late18th Century. He was a good friend of Goethe and the garden features an original stone table where, whenever Goethe was in town, they sat here chatting almost every day. Following Schiller’s death, the estate was purchased by the state and Duke Carl August, the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, had an observatory built on the site. Optical engineer, lecturer and physicist, Ernst Abbe became director of this observatory while living in Schiller’s former garden house. A meridian stone was erected in the grounds to serve as a southern marker for telescope alignment and precise time determination.

Together with Otto Schott and Carl Zeiss, Ernst Abbe developed numerous optical instruments. He came up with the mathematical foundation of microscope design and formulated the limit of optical resolution in an imaging device due to diffraction, nowadays also known as the “Abbe limit”.

There was a beautiful and fascinating exhibition Electrum mundi – Amber worlds at The Jena Phyletic Museum, a globally unique institution founded by Ernst Haeckel, dedicated to the history of evolution and the development of life on Earth. There are more than 200 amber deposits worldwide, it is found on all continents except Antarctica. Amber has always been intriguing for its unusual properties. The Greeks named it ḗlektron for its power to attract other materials. Desired as jewellery for its translucence and rare inclusions that hold lifeforms eternally preserved, pure amber is known as Solar Stone for its golden colour and is very valuable.

The presentation of the tiny amber pieces next to a blown up digital image revealing what is held at this scale in these miniature cosmos was very effective. There are three categorizations of tree resin depending on its age which can be determined by carbon dating, chemical analysis and also by any identifiable inclusions. Amber is fully fossilized and hundreds of millions years old, copal is sub-fossilized and a few hundred thousand years old, defaunation resin defines copal from 1760, the beginning of industrialization. The oldest amber found so far was in Illinois and dated to be 320 million years old. The oldest amber with inclusions, a mosquito and two mites, was dated at 230 million years old, a time when all land masses were merged into the giant continent Pangea. Baltic amber has been used in Europe since at least the neolithic period, travelling the amber road into Egypt and Asia.

Thirty-six pieces of unpolished amber were located in Goethe’s mineral collection and have been non-invasively examined with micro-CT scanning. The insects in the inclusions were able to be identified and transformed into 3D computer models.

The demand for amber has put it at the centre of aggressive trade practices, illegal mining and the manufacture of fake inclusions. During the Middle Ages, the rich amber-producing Baltic coastline became known as the amber shelf was was controlled by the Teutonic Knights and turned into a strict state monopoly. At this time, amber was not just decorative but also used as a source of light, being burnt instead of beeswax, it was sought after as a guard against disease and used by the wealthy as gambling tokens. The state legacy of control continued until 1945.

Illegal amber mining is currently causing major environmental damage particularly in Ukraine and Russia, along with social problems caused by violent gang warfare and lack of policing exacerbated by the war. Extraction methods involve pumping water into the land, hoping the amber will float to the surface to be skimmed of, this flooding leaves huge areas of land devasted and unusable.

At a stop in Cologne on the way to Jena, I came across The Friends Rendezvous (Au rendez-vous des amis) painting by Max Ernst, 1922 at the Museum Ludwig. Having recently experienced the 2026 total eclipse of the sun in Greenland, surrounded by icebergs, the painting struck a chord with the background depicting a total eclipse and what looked like icebergs (though these turned out to be representations of the Alps). Ernst’s use of an eclipse in his painting is to signify a portent for change at the advent of the surrealist movement.

Ernst may well have been influenced by recent total solar eclipses that took on great significance as the observations obtained during these eclipses were able to confirm Einstein’s theory of general relativity, that gravity can bend space-time. In 1919 two expeditions set forth to make observations from Brazil, and an island off the west coast of Africa. Astronomer Royal Frank Dyson suffered equipment failure in Brazil but Arthur Eddington, was able to photograph the event giving results consistent with gravitational lensing. In 1922 it was possible to confirm these results when a total solar eclipse travelled the full width of Australia offering a full five minutes of totality and drawing astronomers from the United States, Canada, New Zealand, India and Britain to journey to a remote setting to make their observations.

Also at the Museum Ludwig I found Palianytsia (white bread) 2022 by Zhanna Kadyrova very moving. She collects stones from the rivers of the Carpathian Mountains which resemble Ukranian loaves when sliced. Wheat shapes the landscape and economy of Ukraine. The exhibition text refers to the requisition of wheat by Bolsheviks in the 1930’s which left 4 million people to starve. The work was made the same year as the Russians invaded Ukraine causing a severe drop in wheat production and triggering major disruptions in global grain markets.

Having been looking at various methods of string art I was impressed by Günther Uecker’s nail reliefs from 1968, although no string or thread is involved.

A very entertaining talk at Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden, from Mary Branson on her past exploits, including her extraordinary work New Dawn installed in the Houses of Parliament, which celebrates the centenary of the Suffrage movement. There was also the opportunity to view her very touching and personal ‘A Conversation with My Mother’ installed here for the summer season. Inspired by a vibrant dream of having a conversation with her mother while in a boat at a time when her mother was suffering from dementia and was no longer able to speak. The boat, made from hand steamed and bent wooden pallets is lined with copper leaf giving it an unearthly inner glow. The boat is viewed from a bench set between speakers where you hear the garden appropriate poem, ‘Insects’ by John Clare, recited. From one side you hear the voice of Mary, and from the other, the voice of her mother recorded at a time just before the onset of her illness. The recital descends into static, which Mary says describes the loss of communication between them but I thought might represent the electromagnetic spectrum that could be a way of communicating across dimensions.

I love the work by Charly Blackburn showing in Lanthanides: Rare Earth Spectra, a presentation of works developed during her year-long residency at County Hall Pottery. I was lucky to be able to buy a small piece. Her funded research project, Developing Rare Earth Elements in Ceramic Glazing, investigates the use of rare earth elements within ceramics, exploring their magical, luminescent and light-reactive qualities alongside their wider social and technological significance.

Born from supernova explosions, pulled from the ground and purified at processing plants, Lanthanides are found in lenses, computer screens, lighting, fibre optics, corrective eye-surgery lasers, and MRI scanners. They illuminate streets, sharpen our glasses and peer into our bodies. This exhibition materialises these overlooked elements, revealing the otherwise silent conductors of our tech-laden lifestyles. Erbium pink. Praseodymium green. They are named as ‘critical’ and ’strategic’ but collectively, we barely know their elemental names.

These pieces are very alluring, Charly acknowledges that their crystalline beauty can distract from the more serious implications of the extraction, processing and technological reliance or rare earth minerals that she wishes to highlight. We settled on ‘painfully beautiful’ as an apt description.

From The Land at Proposition Studios, Bethnal Green brings together works that examine the relationship between architecture and the living world. Works included Aeolian (sand welding experiments) Aeolian explores wind as an active architectural agent shaping form, motion and environmental transformation. Central to the research was the study of ‘fulgurites’, glass formations created when lightening strikes sand at extreme temperatures. Blade Building a collaborative timber construction. Earthly Planets, a variety of soil samples fashioned into spheres using the Japanese technique of Doro Dango. A series of rich composite images exploring the rise of the technosphere, generated from blending remote sensing, mapping and environmental data to render visible otherwise unseen infrastructures and processes shaping the earth system.

Jaspar Marsalis Still Life at Chisenhale Gallery. Bringing attention to parts of life that no-one can own. Viewing a large cinematic projection is from a steep slope of scaffolding to give the idea of stadium viewing with a safety warning not to touch the electrostatic speakers which are programmed to emit static tones created from the transmission frequencies of the imagery. The random footage of obscure landscapes is hacked from unsecured surveillance cameras that capture and send footage over an IP network rather than through traditional cables. Obsolete forms of surveillance hardware left behind yet still, almost poignantly, performing their original function. Attention is held by a curiosity as to what might appear next, might some extraordinary event be captured and shared.

Gail Dickerson, Beaconsfield EarthAIR 2026, Environmental Artist In Residence exhibition showing research and works in progress and new works made with London Clay and Lambeth Group Sediments. Gail works closely with London Geodiversity Partnership and Museum of London in her exploration of local geologies and London Clay. An incredible amount of work with detailed cataloguing of the soil to reveal the changes at different depths and some great painterly collaborations with the earth.

A visit to Goodwood Art Foundation Sculpture Park to see the fabulous Nancy Holt exhibition MoonSunStarEarthSkyWater. The last time I visited the park was in 2008 when it was the Cass Sculpture Park. A lot has changed. It only reopened 14 months ago and it is still shiny and new. Nancy Holt’s work, as curator Ann Gallagher points out, is all about perceiving. Some of the works in the gallery were made after her visit to the UK in 1969 where she was fascinated by ancient neolithic sites but also the bright orange markings of hiking trails in the lake district.

Nancy Holt’s Hydra’s Head (1974) earthwork, formed of six pools of water positioned according to the Hydra constellation, has its first posthumous installation within the Foundation’s chalk quarry, where the pools reflect the changing skies above.

Also some great pieces by Eva Rothschild.

Rachel Whiteread’s solidification of space looking good set against a living, breathing woodland setting.

A vast magic cube throwing colours about by Hélio Oiticica, Susan Philipsz beautifully layered soundscape that draws you further into the woods and strong pairing of steel and stone by Lee Ufan.

Saw a fantastic production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard at the Duke of York’s Theatre, which explores the relationship between past and present, order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty. It slices across time to reveal perspectives on nature, fashions in stylised landscape with carefully placed ruins and even a real hermit installed. The search for truth, authenticity and academic renown is ripped apart. Acerbically funny and very clever.

Some passages from my 2014 MA dissertation Finding Paradise –

In his book Forests; the Shadow of Civilization Robert Pogue Harrison brings to our attention the rich history of our relationship with the forest as our first refuge and birthplace of civilization. From the legends and poetry of the past we are saturated in the belief that our origins are in the woods. He quotes from Virgil’s Aeneid

“These woodland places
Once were homes of local fauns and nymphs
Together with a race of men that came
From tree trunks, from hard oak”

Since these ancient beginnings when we first carved out a space in the forest we have always looked back to a time when we believed we lived in harmony with nature. Our shared beliefs took root in Greek mythology where poets told of a Golden Age of men living blissfully on the bounty of the land, a world of innocent sanctity lost to us amid the power struggles of the Titans. Virgil took up the theme of a lost haven of delight locating it in an idealized Arcady transposing pastoral imagery from the lush valleys and meadows of Sicily onto the wild and rocky Greek countryside. The fantasy of Arcadia was born which has inspired the artists and poets we have revered ever since.

The framing of a new perspective where landscape becomes picture was fuelled by sciences whose methodology required exactitude. Through measuring our world we hoped to gain control. First the poetic wisdom of the sage was abandoned, then the erudite scholar was replaced by the incisive research man extolling the objectification of nature. Nature that could be experienced vicariously through painting denied the viewer a visceral encounter and heralded the sublimation of desire for direct contact. The mythologizing of the rural began even before Virgil’s ‘Bucolics’ and continues today “massaged by technological spectacle” in mass entertainments such as ‘Avatar’.

Reading

I have returned to reading The Physics of Angels and am intrigued by Rupert Sheldrake’s theories on the potential consciousness of the sun. Having spent quite a lot of time looking at the sun (through a filter) and watching it being totally eclipsed, I quite like the idea that it is conscious in some incomprehensible way, which would mean all the other stars are as well. A universe filled with cosmic bodies crackling and glimmering with electrical impulses of such complexity that what the sun is experiencing is totally outside what we can understand yet maybe we can acknowledge in some way.

‘If there’s a connection between our consciousness and complex, dynamic electromagnetic patterns in our brains, there’s no reason that I can see for denying the possibility of this connection in other cases and especially on the sun.‘

Tags amber, Annabel Elgar, Arcadia, Charly Blackburn, Cherenkov radiation, Cosmati pavement, Cosmos: the art of observing space, Equivalentbehaviour, Ernst Abbe, Eva Rothschild, Gail Dickerson, Günther Uecker, Goethe, Goodwood Art Foundation, Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden, HAPAX Living Room, Haverah Park, Jena, Large Hadron Collider, magnetic field reversal, Mary Branson, Max Ernst, Museum Ludwig, Nancy Holt, Phyletic Museum, Planetarium, Rachel Whiteread, Rupert Sheldrake, RWA secret auction, Schiller, sheep, Susan Philipsz, The Book of Reversals, total eclipse, total solar eclipse, Zeiss, Zhanna Kadyrova

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Of the Moon

May 7, 2026 //

Over the moon to be longlisted for the 2025 Artangel Open amongst such amazing company. I am grateful to Artangel and the selection panel Zineb Sedira, Nitin Sawhney CBE, Freddie Opoku-Addaie, Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Mariam Zulfiqar for considering my proposal regarding the Haverah Park Experiment.

Cosmic rays impact technology and life on Earth but their origin and source of enormous energy is still a mystery. I seek to activate the historically remarkable yet humble Haverah Park detector huts abandoned in various states of collapse across the North Yorkshire moors, through workshops, performance, dark sky gazing, creating artworks that interact directly with cosmic rays and installations that respect local land use, to reflect on pioneering cosmology, human curiosity and wonder.

Cosmic rays are fast-moving particles from space that constantly bombard the earth from all directions. About 5 million pass through your body every day. Wherever they come from, the highest-energy particles hold secrets to the origin of their enormous energies which can be many millions of times greater than any earthbound particle accelerator can generate.

The Haverah Park experiment began in the 1960’s, led by the University of Leeds, and ran for over 20 years. I met with Professor Alan Watson in 2024 to visit the huts and hear about his role in setting up the project and his subsequent life’s work in search of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. It appeals to me that the astonishing achievement of observing particles arriving on Earth from other galaxies happened at these unassuming structures. The huts were built to protect the array of over 200 water-Cherenkov detectors from freezing. When cosmic rays pass through the water tanks, they emit a blue glow of Cherenkov radiation because they travel faster than the speed of light in water. This light can be recorded and calculations made to discover the energy of the primary particle. The shadow of the moon can be seen by detectors on Earth as it absorbs many galactic cosmic rays causing a ‘shadow’ in the otherwise uniform flux of particles from space.

Although I have not been shortlisted for the Artangel commission, I am excited to continue my investigations into these unexpected sites of space exploration and develop these ideas for artworks and a public programme further.

Congratulations to all artists selected and good luck to the shortlisted artists.

I am excited to be taking part in the upcoming occupation of the Safehouses, Peckham with such a fabulous selection of artists.

Curated by Julie Hoyle the exhibition brings together a cross-section of artists from Royal Academicians to emerging practitioners, alongside artists working within disability and community contexts.
Works include painting, sculpture, print, installation, ceramics and moving image. Moving through rooms, staircases and thresholds, visitors will encounter works that move between the intimate and the uncanny, the material and the imagined.
I will be showing work informed by the otherworlds of creatures we share our spaces with as exotic places of discovery and sites of emerging or alternative consciousness.

I have been working on a new video Guttanaut thinking about the extraordinary diversity of life we share our planet with and the invisible creatures found very close to home. This has involved gathering moss from my house gutters and filming the life found within under my microscope, recording the sounds of the gutter with a hydroponic microphone and inserting an endoscope camera into the gutters and drainpipes. Gutta, as used in the title, originates from the Latin meaning ‘a drop’. For the microscopic explorers in this film, a drop of water may comprise their whole universe. They are very tiny and I have been astounded at the variety and energy of the life found here. I have made some icosahedron and octahedron shapes that represent the elemental qualities of water and air to accompany the projection and also to appear in the film in the guise of satellites or modes of exploration.

I will also be showing Belly of a Rock, a hybrid between rock, mollusc and technology, this video sculpture reflects on an early lifeform’s emerging self-awareness, desire to communicate and urge to create. These works celebrate the extraordinary found in hidden corners. Molluscs are known to show a synchronized response to the moon, altering their behaviour based on both light intensity and tidal movements associated with the lunar cycle. They use the moon as an environmental cue to adjust feeding times, metabolic activity, and reproductive spawning. It may be that these behaviours are adapted to match the movement of plankton, which is also affected by moonlight, or to ensure they are submerged during high tide, which is influenced by the moon’s gravity.

Great to have another studio visit from curator Catherine Li in preparation for my upcoming show at Brompton Cemetery Chapel. The title will be, Appearances are a Glimpse of the Unseen, a quote attributed to Anaxagoras, a pre-Socratic philosopher, exiled for controversial natural explanations of the cosmos. It suggests that despite the limitations of human senses we can discover the underlying structure of reality through careful observation and reasoning. Aligning to the precepts of scientific enquiry, in studying the “appearances” of the visible world to reveal the imperceptible, Anaxagoras concluded that matter is made of finely mixed ingredients and wholly entangled so that “everything has a portion of everything,” and it is “Nous” (the mind), that acts as an organising force in creating reality by relating what is seen to what can be inferred.

I will be showing some existing and some new works that draw on the desire to see what is beyond our horizons, question how we interpret the world around us and consider what influences our perception of reality. I have been stitching the Book of Reversals, a poetic interpretation of the formation of planet Earth and its turbulent internal fluid core that generates an unpredictable but protective magnetic field prone to sudden changes in polarity. I am adapting an old slide viewer to show crystals changing colour using a polarising filter. I am making a new edition to the series of sculptures Instruments of the Anemoi – this one is based on a star chart, centred on the star Thuban, which was the pole star before Polaris. I am experimenting with black concrete, though it may end up being dark grey, and I am growing crystals as analogues for the stars. Also, it was great to have the opportunity to set up the sculptures of everydaymatters in an empty studio to assess their inclusion in the show.

I also spent some time in the cemetery taking photos for new images to print on organza and float in water for a site specific edition of work submīrārī (earthbound) that reflects on this place of acutely felt impermanence with weathered stones, encroaching nature and the many carved dates of remembrance receding and fading.

I was happy to speak about my work Radical Pair for a special invitation curators tour in the last week of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. The exhibition was beautifully curated by Maria Hinel who has an impressive art history knowledge and can also speak in real depth about the works she curates. I enjoyed hearing more about the other works in the show which draws on the novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk and the works of William Blake, asking what forms of empathy might emerge when animals are recognised as ethical and political agents in their own right.

I made a trip to Bristol to spend some time with the works in Cosmos: the art of observing space at the RWA during the final week of the show. Such a rich selection of work to enjoy and it’s always nice to see people engaging with your own work. It hardly seems any time since install and now it has to come down. Great news though that the exhibition will be travelling to Aberdeen Art Gallery later in the year. It will be interesting to see how the works will be curated in a new space. It was an honour to have The Obelisk (of sedimentary knowledge) sitting between Ione Parkin’s Volatile Phenomena painting and Sir Christopher Le Brun’s Phases of the Moon IV of which he says ‘Compelling and grave, the Moon is one of the most haunting of natural symbols- more felt then understood. Here it is shown in a narrative of day and night, with passages of cool and warm light succeeding each other’.

The exhibition has been really popular and Ione did an amazing job alongside the Royal Astronomical Society to bring together such a diverse range of contemporary artwork inspired by themes of astronomy, cosmology, astrophysics, planetary atmospherics, solar dynamics, space exploration and celestial mechanics as well as many astronomy-related items of historical significance loaned from public collections.

I will be opening my studio door for the upcoming Open Studios. It’s also a chance to meet the other artists in my corridor many of whom are new this year.

Out and About

Making Ground curated by Andrew Ekins at Thames-side Studios Gallery, brings together artists whose practice finds common ground in an exploration of the relationship between a topographical terrain and a crumpled landscape of the human condition. Featuring: Kabir Hussain (sculpture in bronze), Dan Hays (conflation of digital technology, and the tactile, flawed and time-consuming medium of painting), Graham Crowley (luminous discourse), Simon Callery (painting rooted in materiality), Andrew Ekins (sediment of experience and memory), Joanna Whittle (real and imaginary landscapes), Harriet Mena Hill (repurposed salvaged material), Laura White (changeable matter).

Gabriele Risso Vita Immobile at The Chapel at Brompton Cemetery curated by Catherine Li. Stone within stone within stone. The simply presented works in stone, which in themselves allude to the potential shapes that sit within the sculptors block, outlining simple objects or interconnecting forms as intricate puzzle boxes, sit beautifully within the stone chapel.

I completed watching series 2 of For All Mankind which is set in the 1980’s with a base camp already on the moon and ongoing jostling for space supremacy between USA and the Soviet Union that ends in an unlikely accord. So my mind is full of moon fiction while also watching the launch of NASA’s Artemis II and the videos of the astronauts Reid Wiseman (commander), Christina Koch (mission specialist), Victor Glover (pilot), and CSA astronaut Jeremy Hansen (mission specialist) as they fly the farthest humans have yet been into space on a 10-day journey around the Moon and back to Earth.

Tags Adam Green, Alan Watson, Anaxagoras, Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Ann Norfield, Artangel, Artemis II, Belly of a rock, Brompton Cemetery Chapel, Catherine Li, Charlie Betts, Cherenkov radiation, cosmic rays, cosmos, Cosmos: the art of observing space, David Ferry, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Emma Brown, everydaymatters, For All Mankind, Freddie Opoku-Addaie, Fungai Marima, Guttanaut, Gutter, Haverah Park, Helen Baines, icosahedron, Instruments of the Anemoi, Ione Parkin, Janet Currier, Julie Hoyle, Karl Newman, Katherine Jones, longlist, lunar cycle, Mandeep Dillon, Marcelle Hanselaar, Maria Hinel, Mariam Zulfiqar, Marielle Schram, Mary Branson, mollusc, moss, Nitin Sawhney, Occupied, octahedron, Oona Grimes, Open Studios, Penny Green, radical pair, Roya Pourzadi, Royal Astronomical Society, Royal West of England Academy, Safehouses Peckham, sculpture, Strange Company, submīrārī, Sue Baker Kenton, Susan Aldworth, tardigrades, Temsuyanger Longkumer, Tessa Farmer, Thames-side studios, The Azimuth Obelisk (of sedimentary knowledge), The Book of Reversals, Tom Sliwinski, University of Leeds, video, Zineb Sedira

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Over the Bones

April 4, 2026 //

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead curated by Maria Hinel opened at Hypha Gallery 1, Poultry.

The title of the exhibition references Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, the environmentalist and feminist eco-thriller by Olga Tokarczuk, who in turn draws this title from William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell. The story is narrated by Janina Duszejko, an ageing former engineer, amateur translator of Blake and passionate animal rights advocate, whose outcry against hunting is consistently met with bewilderment and contempt. Local authorities and neighbours attribute her pleas to eccentricity, old age, as well as a ‘women’s instinct for caring.’ Echoing William Blake’s dark and prophetic vision of justice – one in which moral reckoning springs from the unsettling return of what has been systematically oppressed and ignored – the exhibition considers the agency of beings beyond the parameters of the rational that constitute the human worldview.

I am very happy to have my two channel video Radical Pair included in this exhibition. The work asks us to consider the very different experiences of the world of other creatures. Monitor 1 imagines what it might be like to have the extra sensory powers of a bird where a protein in the eye is excited by polarised light making it possible to see the Earth’s magnetic field and follow a visual navigatory clue in an accelerated world on the wing. Monitor 2 sequences concentric circles which mimic the geological structure of the Earth to explore the relationship between Earth’s magnetic field and various methods of natural navigation including via magnetoreception and celestial observation used by birds, bees and even magnetotatic bacteria.

In chemistry a radical is an unpaired electron, this state can make it 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 to magnetic fields, even the weak magnetic field of the Earth. Birds move their head to detect the orientation of the magnetic field. The function of cryptochrome varies by species, but its mechanism is always the same: 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.

Radical Pair 2023 Two channel video 4:48 min

It was great to meet some of the other artists and to learn more about their work.

Exhibition images: Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir & Mark Wilson Feral Attraction A project exploring what happens when domestic animals transgress the invisible and unspoken boundaries that separate landscapes of domestication and wildness?, Kat Lyons Season of the Beetle, Oil on canvas, Odonchimeg Davaadorj After midnight love is free 2, Oil on canvas, Black Swans, Ink on paper, Jochen Lempert silver gelatin prints, Francis Alÿs El Gringo, 2003 created in collaboration with Rafael Ortega, the film documents a tense, close-up encounter with a pack of snarling, aggressive dogs, exploring themes of paranoia, surveillance, and the uncomfortable positioning of the outsider, Andy Holden Oologists Record, Mise-en-scene based on police photography of the illegal collection of wild bird eggs discovered under the bed of Matthew Gonshaw, Anne Marie Maes Lightboxes depicting apiary images plus Smell of the Hive, custommade metal laboratory stand, lab glass, glass funnel, rubber dispenser, essential oils, Tiziana Pers drawings of animals that either escaped confinement and were slaughtered or escaped slaughter by being purchased by the artist, Amalia Pica please open hurry (in memory of Washoe), Gypsum, Amalia Pica & Rafael Ortega Pan Troglodytes Ellioti and Cousins, multi-channel video installation – These surveys record members of the largest surviving population of the rarest type of chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes ellioti). The jungle cameras sometimes malfunction, returning images as grainy as those from CCTV’s. In the installation of this wildlife clip, chimpanzees drift in and out of the camera’s eye. However, they are not the only ones being observed.

Some professional install shots here

I enjoyed the special event – novelist Chloe Aridjis in conversation with Maria Hinel. Reading her prose poem on the plight of the Pangolin, a short essay and an excerpt from her new book. Her writing centres around her own everyday experiences, including her pets and the stray dogs of Mexico, and a sensitivity to animals influenced by her activist parents that shaped her own passion for animal rights.

Chloe Aridjis is the author of Book of Clouds, which won the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger in France, Asunder, which tells the story of a museum guard at the National Gallery, and Sea Monsters, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She writes for various art journals and was a guest curator of the Leonora Carrington retrospective at Tate Liverpool, as well as previously contributing to the catalogue for ‘Paula Rego: Crivelli’s Garden’ in 2023. Her new book titled The Shadow of the Object comes out in April 2026.

Cosmos: the art of observing space curated by Ione Parkin in partnership with The Royal Astronomical Society at RWA Bristol has had a fantastic public response and some great reviews.

Precious astronomical artefacts from institution archives sit alongside works by artists:
Kate Bernstein 🌖 Annie Cattrell 🌖 Ian Chamberlain 🌖 Richard Cox 🌖 Geraldine Cox 🌖 Susan Derges 🌖 Otto Dettmer 🌖 Sarah Duncan 🌔 Susan Eyre 🌕 Anna Gillespie 🌖 Tom Hammick 🌖 Alex Hartley 🌖 Simon Hitchens 🌖 Janette Kerr 🌖 Melanie King 🌖 Tania Kovats 🌖 Ulrike Kuchner 🌖 Lynda Laird 🌖 Christopher Le Brun 🌖 Johanna Love 🌖 Gillian McFarland 🌖 Rachael Nee 🌖 Pale Blue Dot Collective (Louise Beer and John Hooper) 🌖 Cornelia Parker 🌖 Ione Parkin 🌖 Michael Porter 🌖 Ben Rowe 🌖 Robin Sewell 🌖 Jane Sheppard 🌖 Yinka Shonibare 🌖 Karl Singporewala 🌖 Wolfgang Tillmans

It has also been confirmed that the exhibition will be travelling to Aberdeen Art Gallery later in the year for a 6 month run. It has been a great experience being part of this timely exhibition and I am so pleased it will reach new audiences. As we face many environmental challenges, as space both expands and contracts – in that we can see further than ever before in greater detail, but are in the process of building a metal cage around our planet obliterating our view of the stars from Earth, when space exploration prioritises space exploitation and extraction, conversations about our place in the universe in relation to others including the non-human, and the inorganic is vital. It is clear that artists and scientists question the world we share in very similar ways through experiment, analysis and imagination. Both perspectives can change our view of reality. Congratulations to Ione for bringing us together to have these conversations and engage with artworks that enable us to feel a personal connection to the cosmos rather than merely observe it as something distant and intangible.

Studio International review Cosmos: The Art of Observing Space

Dr Katy Barrett https://www.spoonsontrays.com/blog/cosmos-the-art-and-science-of-observing-space

The four works I have in Cosmos: the art of observing space are The Obelisk (of sedimentary knowledge), 92 Years Measured in Light, Orbital and Sun Factor.

The following selection of exhibition images are courtesy of Alastair Brookes, KoLab Studios.

In the studio I have been busy editing a new video work looking at the otherworlds inhabited by microscopic creatures of the gutter, to be shown in the upcoming exhibition Occupied: Strange Company curated by Julie Hoyle. This exhibition brings together contemporary artists whose works temporarily inhabit the rooms of the Safehouses in Peckham. Set within the remnants of domesticity, painting, sculpture, print, installation and moving image sit alongside each other in unexpected ways, shifting the atmosphere of the house and rendering the familiar strange.

Site visit to Safehouses. I plan to project onto bare brickwork in the exposed loftspace.

Out and About and Online

Inspiring public lecture at the Geological Society Exploring the extraterrestrial: from meteors to micrometeorites encouraging us to install meteor detector cameras on our homes and sift through the dust that collects on our roofs and in our gutters to hunt for micrometeorites. I would like to install a camera but am hampered by a lot of light pollution, surrounding rooftops and wayward trees. Having been fascinated by all the creatures that live in my gutters and making new work envisaging these as astronauts finding cosmic dust spheroids would be a fitting addition but I would need a much more powerful microscope to identify these objects that vary in size but are usually about a hair’s breadth across.

A display of photographs by Max Alexander has been installed by the Royal Astronomical Society in the courtyard of Burlington House highlighting the growing problem of space junk orbiting our planet.

Enjoyed this nourishment – Emergence magazine article Wrinkled Time: The Persistence of Past Worlds on Earth by Marcia Bjornerud and The Mater podcast on minerals.

This article in Future Observatory Journal – More than Human, on a re-reading of Thomas Nagel’s text ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, which was published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, has some interesting points to think about when considering how more than human creatures experience the world.

More-than-human also means other-than-human imagination and conceptual apparatus. In non-human worlds based on different senses – olfactory, electrical, seismic, magnetic, auditory – things that are invisible to us, for example, might be concrete and tangible, and what is seemingly solid to another animal might be imperceptible to us. From a non-human perspective, objects that we give distinct identities to through language – teapot, steam, air – become unified in ways that fuse words into new, multi-layered object identities, beyond visual appearances.

absolute now II at Danielle Arnaud featuring Rieko Akatsuka, George Barber, Kaz, Guy Sherwin, Tereza Stehlikova. Drawing on the essay Time and Eternity by D.T.Suzuki the works in this exhibition curated by Kaz engage with moments of frozen time, frames looped in the video or animation that together suggest time moving forwards. Magical diorama and inventive video installations.

Suzuki also compares the human experience of reality to that of other animals, believing they do not have self awareness to question the concept of eternity, to criticise or desire beyond the life they know. That human consciousness enables us to imagine and to step out of reality, to dream. But we can never imagine what totally different reality a bat experiences.

Deep Veins celebrating International Women’s Day, Brompton Cemetery Chapel sensitively curated by Catherine Li and supported by Friends of Brompton Cemetery. Images 1/2 Lisa Pettibone, 3 Alice Cunningham, 4 install shots 5 Sato Sugamoto, 6 Rachel Goodison. Works also include Philippa Beveridge and Helen Barff.

Gravity is Occult: Studies of the Cosmos at Farsight Gallery. The exhibition featured paintings by Kevin Quigley and Siobhán McAuley. Modern physics and occultism have a complex, intertwined history, especially during the Victorian era and the birth of quantum theory – where scientists studied psychic phenomena, alchemy, and spiritualism, seeking deeper realities beyond materialism.

As Artists and Thinkers we like to dream into and explore ‘hidden’ worlds.

I very much enjoyed the performance The Gravitician (Newtonian Performance) by Calum F Kerr with cosmic diagram film projection Continuum by Mary Yacoob. Having started reading Martin Rees book Just Six Numbers (on how the behaviour and origins of the universe can be explained by just six numbers) and grappling with the number that describes gravity I was entranced by the repetitive mantra of the Gravitician ‘I see f is equal to g’. In classical physics, (force) represents gravity, calculated as (Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation).