Archives for posts with tag: Julie Hoyle

Of the Moon

May 7, 2026 //
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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.

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Over the Bones

April 4, 2026 //
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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).

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never still

November 3, 2025 //
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The finale of the exhibition programme of Carbon, Carbon Everywhere co-curated by Indira Dyussebayeva-Ziyabek and Maria Hinel at Hypha HQ included an exhibition tour, a BREAT(HOLD) workshop led by Ania Mokrzycka and an invitation to view cosmic particle trails passing through a cloud chamber.

This simple equipment of a plastic tank saturated with isopropyl alcohol vapour over a metal tray sitting on dry ice was used to capture footage for the video Cosmic Chiasmus: crossing the universe showing in the exhibition. Cosmic rays are fast-moving particles, blasted across space, spiralling along magnetic field lines to end up entangled with carbon in our bodies.

Installation image of Cosmic Chiasmus: crossing the universe

Not only is all life physically permeated by cosmic rays with the potential for nuclei collisions but some cascading particles smash into atoms of nitrogen to create carbon-14 which combines with oxygen in the atmosphere to create radioactive carbon-dioxide which enters the food cycle via photosynthesis.  Cosmic ray activity creating Carbon-14 allows us to perform carbon dating techniques offering insights into Earth’s past climate, magnetic field, solar activity, and changes in the carbon cycle, helping to understand historical patterns and establish timelines for ancient human history.

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

‘It is possible to demonstrate that this completely arbitrary story is true. I could tell innumerable other stories, and they would all be true: literally true, in the nature of the transitions, in their order and data. The number of atoms is so great that one could always be found whose story coincides with any capriciously invented story’ Primo Levi

This was a beautiful show and I was thrilled to be invited to exhibit alongside such amazing artists including Emii Alrai, Anousha Payne, Kate Daudy, Konstantin Novoselov, Ania Mokrzycka, Nissa Nishikawa, Mariele Neudecker, Simon Faithfull, Aimee Parrott, Lucia Pizzani, Lizi Sanchez and Meng Zhou.

I am very excited to have an invitation to exhibit at the Safehouses in Peckham next year with a group of wonderful artists and friends. Curated by Julie Hoyle, the artists have been selected for the way their work resonates with the atmosphere of the Safehouses — places where traces of the past meet the imagined and the unseen. Together, the works will form a dialogue between beauty and unease, the real and the imagined, reanimating the stripped-bare rooms with strange company. We had a productive site visit and I have two spaces in mind to work with – one above and one below.

There is an ongoing refurbishment project at my studio complex which although welcome improvements has caused a little disruption to my ability to work there recently. My unit has had a new roof installed and each studio is being insulated with a new ceiling and opening Velux window. When the new roof went on we lost our ceiling windows so it is wonderful to have natural light from above again. Having to move everything out of my studio for a couple of weeks has been a good exercise in discovering long hidden materials and putting it all back has forced my hand to have a bit of a clear out of items I am unlikely to use and pass these on to other studio holders. Images show before, during and after.

I managed to get everything back into my studio just in time for a studio visit from curator Catherine Li to discuss the possibility of exhibiting at Brompton Cemetery Chapel next year. It is a stunning building so I am very excited about this upcoming project.

I have been experimenting with an old wooden slide viewer, printing images onto acetate from my microscope camera of polarised crystal and rock structures.

Work in progress on The Book of Reversals, writing text to print over the screen-printed magnetic graph lines. Ocean floor magnetic stripes are formed as magma cools at mid-ocean ridges. These alternating bands show Earth’s magnetic field reversals, with minerals in the crust aligning to current polarity and recording each change in pattern.

Colossal forces spinning dust

Aeons of accretion and gravity / shaping the debris of destruction

Searing elements separate /  amidst violence and decay

The weighty fall, pulled down, digested / feeling pressure only diamonds can survive

Work in progress looking at the sacred geometry of the Westminster Abbey Cosmati Pavement and relating medieval symbolism with contemporary iconography to think about changing relationships to fire, water, earth, air and the cosmos. Reimagining imagery from the Cosmati Pavement and particle accelerator at CERN.

Out and About

Noémie Goudal And yet it still moves at Edel Assanti. Mesmerizing work. I especially found the work Rocks very effective, an inkjet print on photographic paper with a video projection that moves across the image highlighting certain parts as though a torch is traversing a dark landscape. I always enjoy the theatricality of her large scale video installations even if they do purport a world collapsing around us.

Gorgeous paintings by Helen Baines in Striding Edge at The Department Store, Brixton. Photos don’t capture the ethereal luminosity.

The hypnotic monument of modified LED laptop screens Wiped (Free Palastine) by Katrin Hanusch in Return of the Repressed curated by Toby Ziegler at an empty office block 10 Heddon Street. A show examining alienation and abstraction of the human experience in a climate of digital technology and AI.

The magnificent Babel by Cildo Meireles at Tate Modern. With slightly dalek vibes, this thrumming ‘tower of incomprehension’ relates to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, a tower tall enough to reach the heavens. God was offended by this structure, and caused the builders to speak in different languages. No longer able to understand one another, they became divided and scattered across the earth, and so began all mankind’s conflicts. Here we are, punished for our curiosity, again. This work though is a joy.

Material Actors curated by binder of women at Hypha Gallery 3 / No. 1 Poultry, London explores the tipping point of formal representation into the theatrical and cinematic world of mimicry and artifice. The artists include Alice Browne, Charlie Franklin, Lauren Godfrey, Oona Grimes, Pia Pack, Milly Peck, Michelle Williams Gamaker and Laura White. Material process and the façade are key in many of the works that surprise and confound definition.

Quantum Storytelling and the Cosmic Oval – a fascinating discussion exploring how cosmic discoveries influence cultural narratives and the composing of histories. Physicist and author Janna Levin in conversation with writer Ella Finer to celebrate the launch of a new book commission The Cosmic Oval. Chaired by Lily Jencks, Keeper of Vision at The Cosmic House, with further insight from Tony Milligan, Research Fellow in the Philosophy of Ethics, Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London.

Quantum Untangled at The Science Gallery, London. I liked the simplicity of Alistair McClymont’s An Early Universe where wave patterns caused in water by low frequency sound vibrations are projected via a lens to reference quantum oscillations created when the universe was rapidly expanding after the big bang. Two large installations from Conrad Shawcross use the play of shadows to signify intangible forces of the universe. In Ringdown two caged spherical pendulums oscillate in violent motion to evoke the spiralling motion of gravitational waves in the moments after two black holes merge, a phase known as ‘ringdown.’ The artwork is probed with sensors to trace the magnetic field generated, which is displayed on a monitor. The Blind Proliferation explores the idea that our Universe is one of many co-existing ‘bubble universes’ formed in the period of rapid expansion at the beginning of time. Two ‘scientist’s offices sit either side of a structure casting complex shadows. In a nod to Plato, the scientists can only see the shadows from which they must determine their origin. There are slight differences between the two offices to suggest the idea of the multiverse where many worlds may exist with only slight variations. Daniela Brill Estrada & Monica C. LoCascio, Begriff des Körpers reflect on the nature of perception and shared understanding through their use of copper, a key material in quantum technologies, to create sculptures that describe the diagrammatic language of scientists when explaining spacetime and quantum phenomena.

It is always exciting to enter a truly dark space – NOWISWHENWEARE (The Stars) at the Rambert Dance Studios as part of the LFF Expanded program promised a breath-taking journey through light and sound when you would enter a meditative state and come face to face with your inner self. With nearly 4,000 reactive LED lights and a 496-channel soundscape it was an enjoyable experience but perhaps not quite as awe inspiring as hoped.

(S)low Tech AI by Studio Above & Below (Daria Jelonek and Perry-James Sugden) at Victoria and Albert Museum. ‘This installation examines artificial intelligence through the lens of geology. A sculptural interface of four rocks activates a slow, responsive AI system that reacts to touch with evolving sound and image. Each new rock arrangement adds a line to a growing digital landscape, echoing sedimentary layers shaped by collective interaction. The imagery is drawn from four geologically significant sites in Scotland, where ancient stone carvings show early examples of symbolic data recording. Using simple algorithms, the work invites reflection on AI as a slow, ethical, and materially-aware process.’ I couldn’t determine what changes were set in motion when the stones were moved, it does say it is a slow process so perhaps I shouldn’t have expected to notice the impact of my moving the stones and it is something that builds into the algorithm later. It was still quite mesmerising to watch.

Luca Bosani Unidentified Performing Objects at Victoria and Albert Museum

Loved these boots that look like they have been torn from the rock. Magnes might have felt a slight tug as the nails in his boots clung to the magnetite beneath his feet but imagine the weight, the feeling of increased gravity walking in boots of rock.

The Ripple Effect by Alicja Patanowski blending materials from one of the largest mining waste reservoirs in Europe with clay to create a tiled seating installation in the John Madejski Garden.

Screening as part of the London Film Festival, John Lilly and The Earth Coincidence Control Office directed by Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens, explores Lilly’s radical experiments with isolation tanks and LSD to study consciousness, as well as his theory that a hidden entity called the Earth Coincidence Control Office (E.C.C.O.) secretly influences human events. Despite his desire to communicate with cetaceans believing them to be intelligent conscious beings he exhibits a cold disconnect to their physical and emotional welfare. A lot of the footage is shocking to a contemporary audience in its cruelty but his research into human consciousness was trailblazing at the time and his conclusion that humans were at risk from an outside technology based intelligence does have some prescience considering current concerns over AI.

Artists First: Contemporary perspectives on portraiture at The National Portrait Gallery commissioned several artists to respond to an artwork of their choice. Charmaine Watkiss chose the portrait of Sir Hans Sloane, a botanist and collector who travelled to Jamaica in 1687 taking advantage of enslaved people’s indigenous knowledge of the location, properties and medicinal uses of local plants to boost his collection and furnish his publication. Charmaine’s beautifully crafted response To reimagine an African Queen shifts the dynamic to reflect the dissonance between these two human’s relationship to nature, one built on wisdom and respect and one which based on extraction and mastery.

Reading

The Stone Woman by A.S. Byatt. An evocative journey into becoming other.

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