Archives for posts with tag: lunar cycle

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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Intellect

January 7, 2023 //
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Editing footage for the video Belly of a Rock which will be shown on an old monitor encased in a sculptural hybrid form relating to both mollusc and rock. The giant sea slug of the mollusc family, can derive directional cues from the magnetic field of the earth which is then modified in response to the lunar cycle. It orients its body between north and east prior to a full moon. In the slug’s nervous system, four particular neurons are stimulated by changes in the applied magnetic field, and two are inhibited by such changes suggesting that the animal uses its magnetic sense continuously to help it travel in a straight line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gallery Visit

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

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

Listening

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

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

According to Laura the single universe theory is mathematically impossible.

Reading

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

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

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

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

Fungal lives are lived in a flood of sensory information.

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

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