Archives for posts with tag: Mary Branson

Secrets

October 6, 2026 //
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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.‘

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Occupied

June 13, 2026 //
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It was a brilliant busy weekend at the Safehouses Peckham for Occupied: Strange Company. So many visitors commented on the excellent curation of the works by Julie Hoyle. Each room had its own unique atmosphere yet all blended so seamlessly across the two houses. I was very happy with the placing of my two installations, one in the rafters the other in a dark recess under the stairs. Both works look to other life forms that we coexist with and often overlook – the mollusc and the creatures of the gutters.

Installation images of my work by Emma Brown Photography

Belly of a Rock suggests a mysterious place of chemical conversations at the intersection of the organic and the inorganic where innards ooze and rocks moan in primordial formation. Reflecting on the emerging consciousness of early life and the urge to communicate and create, as described by Italo Calvino in his story ‘The Spiral’, where a simple mollusc secretes a beautiful spiral shell to impress a beloved, although neither have eyes to visually appreciate the endeavour this act of blind creation becomes a catalyst for evolution.

Guttanaut alludes to Oscar Wilde’s familiar quote ‘We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars’. This video installation transports the viewer to exotic otherworlds inhabited by microscopic creatures found in a drop of water or tuft of moss in the dank environs of house gutters. Icosahedron and octahedron shapes representing the elemental qualities of water and air appear as constructs for satellites or modes of exploration across this alternative cosmos.

Julie Hoyle brought together a cross-section of artists from Royal Academicians to emerging practitioners, alongside artists working within disability and community contexts reflecting her interest in community and unexpected connections.

Works across the exhibition move between the intimate and the otherworldly, often unsettling the boundaries between body, space and perception. Included within a range of strange bodily presences are Susan Aldworth’s work Reassembling the Self. Internal, fragmented and reconfigured lithographs exploring how identity may be disrupted through trauma, illness, or simply the experience of being alive. As does Fungai Marima’s practice, using her own body as both subject and archive in performance. Repeated gestures of exposure and persistence draw attention to the private realities of anxiety and endurance. Charlie Betts’s practice is also rooted in movement and performance. Through drawing and action, she captures fleeting physical states that hold presence, absence and memory in tension. Mary Branson’s installation explores the fragile boundary between rest and exposure through vessel forms and the sound of breathing, evoking a vulnerable presence within places we assume are safe. This focus on vulnerability and embodiment resonates with Us and Them, a series of wet plate collodion portraits by Emma Brown in collaboration with Freewheelers Theatre & Media Company, a creative company of disabled artists and performers, reflecting on representation, visibility and shared humanity. In a shift of atmosphere, Marcelle Hanselaar transforms familiar interiors into psychologically charged scenes where bedrooms and domestic spaces become sites of unease, desire and dreamlike threat. Her figures appear exposed, restless and vulnerable, inhabiting worlds where intimacy and danger uneasily coexist. Beyond the body, the exhibition extends into the domestic, material and more-than-human worlds we inhabit. Janet Currier’s work turns to the objects and organisms we live alongside, where repetition, attachment and care become central. Rooted in the domestic and often autobiographical, her sculptural arrangements suggest that the things we tend to – fabrics, forms, fragments – hold memory and presence, quietly accumulating meaning over time. A similar sensitivity to material and instability is present in the work of Mandeep Dillon and Marielle Schram. Dillon’s ephemeral sculptures explore pressure, balance and the temporary nature of form, their fragile, inflatable structures responding to subtle environmental shifts and hovering between buoyancy and collapse. Schram’s small-scale sculptures and drawings translate emotional experience into tactile form, where diverse materials are handled with sensitivity and control, balancing strength and vulnerability. In both practices, making becomes a visible negotiation between material, form and feeling. Sue Baker Kenton and Ann Norfield consider how things are kept, categorised and carried through time. Baker Kenton’s installation of painted, box-like structures reflects on containment and hidden histories, while Norfield’s use of collected bones and print processes brings a quieter, more direct engagement with chance, hope and the precariousness of life. Together, they reflect on accumulation, fragility and the tenuous nature of what we hold on to. A more overtly uncanny register emerges in works that draw on folklore, memory and psychological space. Oona Grimes’s film and drawings draw on historical and cinematic references to create fragmented, misremembered scenes in which figures appear both comic and spectral. This sense of dislocation and re-framing is echoed in the work of Tom Sliwinski, whose drawings present a personal and immediate view of the world, where historic interiors and figures take on a ghostly presence. A different sense of time emerges in the work of Penny Green and Roya Pourzadi, whose figures and forms draw on myth, symbolism and cultural memory. Their works carry a feeling of something ancient yet still in motion, not fixed in the past, but moving through it. Pourzadi’s imagery draws on Persian histories and elemental forces, where water, vessels and symbolic figures suggest cycles of renewal, fragility and transformation. In contrast, Green constructs a world of masquerade, blending emblems and archetypes across time. Her Wild Women and reworked objects draw on mythological forest figures and medieval imagery, creating presences that feel both rooted in history and strangely alive within the present. Throughout the exhibition artists construct distinct visual worlds that shift between observation and imagination. Katherine Jones transforms familiar imagery through intense light and distortion, pushing it towards something simultaneously seductive and unsettling, beauty and unease seem to exist in tension. Helen Baines painting ‘Show Horse’ similarly draws on lived experience and symbolic imagery and questions the uncomfortable truth of how we bend animals to our will in the name of discipline, love or tradition. A suspended bird moves through a constructed interior that feels both familiar and uncertain in Karl Newman’s Melancholy Study holding a moment of stillness charged with anticipation. Rooted in a deep connection to the natural world, Temsuyanger Longkumer’s installation centres on the reconstruction of a tree, drawn from his printmaking practice. Re-situated within the interior of the house, the work introduces a presence that feels both elemental and enchanting. Oak, wormshells, shed snake skin, hedgehog spines, mouse bones are just a few of the organic and unsettling materials used in Tessa Farmer’s sculptural interventions. Her work introduces meticulously constructed miniature worlds, bringing a darkly intricate presence into the house. Imagined or parallel worlds shaped through narrative and invention is prevalent in Adam Green’s work. His painting shown here presents a system-like visual language of pattern, geometry and reptition, suggesting constructed environments that are at once playful but possibly unstable. Elsewhere, David Ferry’s photomontages reimagine landscape through layered and unexpected combinations, where deserts, oases and shifting terrains disrupt familiar visual language, creating a sense of both recognition and disorientation. Finally and beyond the interior, several works extend into speculative and cosmological realms. Susan Eyre’s video-sculptural installations imagine hybrid lifeforms at the intersection of the organic and inorganic, expanding the exhibition beyond the domestic into a wider consideration of time, scale and the unknown.

Together, the exhibition forms a temporary community of presences, installed in close proximity, the works begin to speak to one another in unexpected ways, forming subtle and unexpected relationships that create a charged and shifting environment in which the familiar is rendered persistently strange.

I am excited to be selected for the HIRESidency at Equivalentbehaviour founded by Katrina Stamatopoulos and Wojciech Kawczyk, who specialise in photographic scanning and digitising photographic film, prints and 3 dimensional mixed-media artwork.

My proposal is to scan the Book of Reversals to make a digital work with narration. The physical work will be exhibited at Brompton Cemetery Chapel in the upcoming Appearances are a Glimpse of the Unseen. This book is 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. Ocean floor magnetic stripes are a geological phenomenon consisting of alternating bands of differing magnetic polarity. Our planet is a complex and dynamic body where interactions occur ceaselessly between the inner core the outer core the mantle and the crust.

Marie Tharp was an American geologist and oceanographic cartographer. In the 1950s, she was instrumental in producing the first scientific map of the Atlantic Ocean floor revealing a detailed topography and multi-dimensional geographical landscape of the ocean bottom. She translated thousands of sonar readings from ships she was barred from boarding as a woman scientist. Mapping the Atlantic, she identified a continuous rift valley along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge: the first visual evidence of seafloor spreading, the mechanism behind plate tectonics and continental drift. When she showed the map to her colleague Bruce Heezen, he dismissed it as “girl talk.” The idea was still considered too radical, especially from a woman excluded from research vessels. But the evidence kept proving her right. As more surveys arrived and earthquake patterns matched her work, the scientific world accepted by the early 1960s, the planet is not fixed, but alive and in motion. In 1977 she co-published the first complete map of the world’s ocean floor, transforming geology, navigation, and our understanding of natural disasters. In 1997 the Library of Congress named her one of the 20th century’s greatest cartographers, and in 2023 National Geographic awarded her the Hubbard Medal. Thanks to Herstory_feminism for highlighting these amazing usually overlooked women who contributed so much.

It was great to meet the team at ArtEO in an online group meet and introduction to the collective initiative that aims to make satellite imagery and data sets available to artists.

I am excited to have access to imagery that I would never be able to create for myself to feed into my work. I am interested to explore aspects of Earth’s magnetic field in relation to how it might be monitored using satellites, how it impacts the functionality of satellites and how satellites might themselves impact the magnetic field. While bringing so much data and valuable information for us to monitor the Earth and run its infrastructures and provide global communication the increasing number of satellites may put us at risk from over reliance on this technology in the face of an unpredictable force of nature. I hope to learn more about how satellites might help in predicting solar storms and what data sets are produced to model the interaction between high energy particles and the magnetosphere. I would also like to explore the relationship between satellite technology and natural phenomena and the balance between observing and disrupting. These images show an active volcano and a site of mineral extraction.

I have been busy with preparations for the upcoming Appearances are a Glimpse of the Unseen which will be in The Chapel at Brompton Cemetery curated by Catherine Li with the support of The Friends of Brompton Cemetery.

I am making a new sculpture in the series Instruments of the Anemoi set of dodecagon tablets cast in Snowcrete, a non-magnetic cement, as used in buildings at a magnetic observatory. Suggestive of the pedestals that support various instruments used in monitoring the Earths’ magnetic field they also respond to an ancient anemoscope “table of the winds” carved in marble around eighteen hundred years ago with the names of the classical winds, both in Greek and in Latin inscribed on each of its twelve sides.

These sculptures are envisaged as speculative objects from past times, shown on repurposed theodolite or telescope tripods, reflecting on methods and tools of natural navigation such as magnetism, wind and stars. The new tablet will reference celestial navigation. Polaris has not always been the Pole Star as Earth’s axis of rotation wobbles over the course of about 26,000 years and many other stars take their turn at pointing to geographic North. I am centring Thuban in the constellation of Draco who took the position between two and four thousand years ago. I have been growing mono-ammonium phosphate crystals to use to outline the constellations whose lines are mapped by casting the concrete onto a collagraph set in a silicon mould. Once the concrete has set, it must be excavated from the cardboard collagraph by careful scraping and peeling away.

I have also been working on new images for submīrārī (earthbound), which feature the unique convergence of nature, history and serenity at Brompton Cemetery along with a myriad of angels that inhabit it. In looking for cultural and scientific explanations of angels I came across a book The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet, in which co-authors Rupert Sheldrake and Matthew Fox discuss parallels between quantum mechanics and early theories of angels, particularly Thomas Aquinas’ teaching that angels are immaterial bodies and creatures of light. The language used to describe the esoteric and the spirit world can often be substituted with the language of physics used to explain energy in its various manifestations.

The images I have been working on are to be printed with sublimation dyes onto organza. I was sad to discover that Promptside printers, who have been so generous to me in the past, in providing paper prints for me to heat press, are no longer operating. I am trying a new company Contrado.

Out of studio activities

Just squeaked in to see The London Group exhibition This That and The Other at The Handbag Factory on its final day.

I managed to catch a couple of the talks ‘In the dark’ room and was intrigued by the work of Ash Xu which responded to the brainwaves of visitors wearing a headpiece attached to a screen monitor. The ‘Cosmic in the Brain’ series is an experimental artistic practice that merges neuroscience technologies with generative art, aiming to translate the abstract processes of human thought into the creation, evolution, and integration of stars within a virtual cosmos via Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology. The work is a collaboration between the artist and the audience. Through intuitive interaction, individual ideas are translated into a shared digital cosmos, allowing each participant’s inner world to contribute to the collective constellation. This process turns private thought into a visible, living landscape, one that unfolds in real time and belongs equally to everyone present.

I also was drawn to the video work by Eric Fong – A haunting journey through Horton Cemetery in Epsom, where thousands of pauper patients, mostly women, from five nearby mental asylums were buried. It is now an abandoned, derelict and overgrown site, where all grave markers have been removed, except one. The footage is overlaid with words drawn from the medical case notes of those buried there.

Mesmerising work by Sandra Crisp – ‘Dark Particles [slow_data]’ explores hybrid forms emerging where biological process and computational culture collide. Particle systems and differential growth generate organic structures whose surfaces are mapped with emoji and climate infographics — the residue of our information-saturated present absorbed into coral-like, cellular forms. Particles fall, accumulate, stick and die. Forms grow, darken and sediment. Rendered in monochrome on everyday hardware, the work embraces slowness. Like fossils, these forms carry traces of their moment — compressed into something unreadable, elusive and dark.

David Redfern On the 12th September 1768 Captain James Cook put in to the island of Madeira to resupply his ship ‘Endeavour’ at the beginning of his epic voyage around the world. Also on board ‘Endeavour’ was a private party of scientists, artists and the amateur botanist Joseph Banks. Banks discovered 25 new plant species on Madeira and needed to preserve the specimens he gathered. He pressed them in a book, a copy of a criticism of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, written by Joseph Addison. The mythical Garden of Eden pressed up against scientific specimens contributing to the burgeoning science of botany. Paradise Lost Book leaves, gathered images 200 x 180cm. This work captured my attention as I am interested in ‘paradise’ and have been looking at angels in Brompton Cemetery at the moment and recently listened to two podcasts where angels feature – Cautionary Tales Podcast on John Dee and the Bureau of Lost Culture Podcast EVP – voices from the other side

Imposing installation with amazing attention to detail from Carol Wyss 7 PILLARS OF WISDOM deconstructs the very concrete order of bones into lines of information — a basis of a new writing to chronicle human interaction. The title of the installation refers to a biblical proverb which outlines a range of moral duties. T. E. Lawrence wrote an autobiography of that same title, likely inspired by Ruskin’s 7 Lamps of Architecture book which Lawrence had previously read. The installation consists of seven large unframed scrolls. Each scroll combines intaglio and relief printmaking techniques on thin Japanese paper.

Qi Baiting House of Day, House of Night at The Chapel, Brompton Cemetery curated by Catherine Li brings together a ‘constellation’ of sculptures inspired by the circulation of objects via numerous flea markets. Drawing from Olga Tokarczuk’s image of living in two homes at once, one fixed in time and space and one infinite, these objects appear on interstellar journeys in which they hold together the material and the immeasurable: the located and the unplaced, the lived and the imagined. The objects remain tied to their historical time, imbued with traces lived experience, while their decontextualization allows other meanings to surface, as though they too were inhabiting more than one home at once. She also alludes to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction: Sometimes the world is nothing more than things placed quietly together.

Royal Astronomical Society talk Solar superstorms: Are we ready for another Carrington Event? by Jim Wild, Professor of Space Physics within the Physics Department at Lancaster University and President-Elect of the Royal Astronomical Society.

In September 1859, the English astronomer Richard Carrington made the first recorded observations of a solar flare. Unknown to Carrington, the flare coincided with a fast-moving coronal mass ejection that struck the Earth’s less than twenty four hours later, triggering the most powerful geomagnetic storm of the modern age. The storm, now known as “the Carrington event”, sparked auroral displays visible as far south as the Caribbean and disrupted operations of the global telegraph network. But this powerful space weather event pre-dated most of the technologies that we depend upon today, such as power grids, satellites, and wireless communications. How vulnerable are we? Are we prepared for the next Carrington event? In this talk, Prof Jim Wild considers the resilience of the modern world to extreme space weather.

The UK National Risk Register sees space weather as significant risk. The term ‘space weather’ describes a series of phenomena originating from the sun, which include solar flares, solar energetic particles and coronal mass ejections. Day-to-day space weather causes little more than the Aurora Borealis in polar regions, but strong space weather events can bring disruption to many vital technologies. Orbiting satellites are particularly vulnerable to space weather effects, and can be damaged or temporarily disabled. Impacts may include regional power disruptions, loss or disruption of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (for example Global Positioning System (GPS)) and some telecommunications (for example satellite communications and high frequency radio), disruption to aviation, an increase in background radiation doses at high altitudes and in space, and possible disruption to ground-based digital components. The catalogue of tracked objects in orbit would be significantly impacted, raising the risk of on-orbit collisions. There may also be second order impacts such as fatalities and casualties (for example, in the event of power disruptions).

Peckham 24 The Eras Edition at Copeland Gallery exploring photography through the lens of time. ‘Time is a paradox; it is intangible, but its traces are omnipresent; it is an illusion, yet it’s governing our lives; it facilitates growth, while inducing decay. The projects exhibited at this year’s Peckham 24 explore these multifaceted aspects of time; they address the issues of our time, interrogate ecological transformation and its long-term implications, capture varying life stages and nostalgic formations, and explore the lingering of the past in the present.’

ROM a large-scale multi-image work by Eugenie Shinkle at first glance looks galactic but is in fact a series of photographs of the material surface of a decaying skatepark. The work reconstructs an experience of space, disorienting, immersive, and at times euphoric. Time is encountered here not as sequence or narrative, but as something embedded in matter and enacted through movement. Built in 1978, the Rom skatepark in Hornchurch, Essex was the first of its kind in the UK. No longer in regular use, the concrete structure is slowly decaying – cracking and delaminating, a consequence of decades of weathering, and of the wear and tear inflicted by the passage of thousands of wheels. Though they’re only a few decades old, the forms have a strangely primordial quality, the concrete stained and colonized by lichen, as if the recent past were already slipping into something more geological.

A Parliament of Empty Gestures by Mark Duffy is made from appropriated photographs produced and distributed by the House of Commons over the past two years. It is a comment on the performative and confrontational nature of political debate, the repetition of prescribed political gestures, and the constantly shifting blame game that is modern politics.

A fabulous iteration of Julie F Hill’s installation Cave and Chasms series where RAW data from space telescopes, such as Hubble and the James Webb is processed, sculpted, crystallized and mineralised drawing on the cosmic and terrestrial to offer an experience of intimate immensity.

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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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dark clouds

July 31, 2016 //
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Research at St. James Weybridge for work thinking about collapsing space in on itself, moving from one space to another via portals, holes in space time, or dream spaces and spiritual spaces.

Seeing intertidal steel plate propped up with the print on my desk has given me some ideas about building images and the idea of opposites. Earth and heaven. If they are as in some myths, a mirror image – how do we know which way is up?

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Happened upon a large very shiny bowl that I will try with new submīrārī images in water.

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It already does amazing things before any water is added. It only came in one size so need to try and find some similar (may be an excuse to go to India where this one was made). Plan to transfer some images from sacred spaces to fabric for the bowls and begin to look for more saints and sacred springs to photograph too to join Mary from St.Non’s holy well.

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The Royal Society Summer Exhibition was a fantastic showcase for science research across the UK, manned by enthusiastic practitioners it was hands on and minds engaged.

It is thought that at the BIG BANG the same number of matter and anti mater particles would have been produced – they then went about colliding with each other – annihilating into photons. We are awash in photons – particles of light. It’s still unknown what  happened to leave enough matter to create all the stars and galaxies and planets of the universe.

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Follow this link  to Antimatter Matters for an in depth explanation of what is going on at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in the search to understand why matter outnumbers antimatter in the universe.

In some information about ring-imaging Cherenkov detectors that distinguish between different types of charged particle such as muons, protons, pions and kaons I was curious to read that particles travel through the gas volume of the detector at faster than the speed of light emitting a coherent shockwave of light – I didn’t think it was possible for anything to travel faster than the speed of light.1607 positron_discovery

Had a chat with Grieg Cowan who, it turns out, helps run a schools outreach programme demonstrating cloud chambers, and explained my interest in particle physics and how I am planning to build a cloud chamber myself inspired by our trip to the Dark Matter Research Laboratory at Boulby. Obviously I won’t be able to make visible any dark matter particles but I am still excited about making other cosmic rays visible and capturing my own images of these tiny projectiles hurtling around us.

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Inspired by bubbles, researchers at the University of Bath studying photonics have created a new hollow glass fibre optic to channel high powered lasers. The walls of these tubes are designed to trap light of particular wavelengths in the core. The effect is similar to the reflection of different wavelengths by the thin film of a bubble.

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The laser loses less energy as the beam travels through air rather than solid glass.

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Fascinating and useful stuff but it was the bubble machine that was the most captivating. The thin soapy membrane stretches, reflecting and refracting light until the skin becomes so thin the light passes straight through – it is this mix of colour and turning to black that is so beautiful and mesmerizing.

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I got to make my own mini spectroscope using a piece of ridged plastic cut from a CD to diffract the light into a cardboard tube and a brief instruction of how to identify differences in LED, fluorescent and even the light on a smart phone which is created using a spectrum plus added blue (cheaper this way).

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The Planck satellite was launched in 2009 into orbit about 1.5 million kilometres away from earth. Over three years it has mapped the whole sky and observed the cosmic microwave background – the afterglow of the big bang when electrons and protons first combined to form transparent hydrogen gas allowing light to travel – it was like a fog lifting across the entire universe.

1607 Planck Cosmic microwave background

The forces of gravity and pressure from trapped light balanced each other creating a slow oscillation of matter through very low frequency sound waves –  the music of the stars. These harmonics can be read and interpreted in cosmological theory supported by the data from Planck. From data gathered by Planck scientists calculate –

4.9% – Normal matter in the Universe
26.8% – Dark matter in the Universe
68.3% – Dark energy
67.8km/s/Mpc  – Expansion rate of the Universe
550 million years – Reionization from first stars forming
13.8 billion years  – Age of the Universe

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There were of course discoveries that didn’t fit in with the standard model and theoretical predictions. Questions about hemispheric asymmetry and the ginormous cold spot remain. A small fraction of the CMB is polarised and this means it contains even more information and may hold further clues about the very early phases of the Universe’s history and also its present and future expansion.

The European Rosetta space mission and Philae explorer spent 10 years travelling to visit Comet 67P.

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Arriving in 2014 at a celestial object with almost no gravity they sent back news of a dusty world of ice and gas but one that also has traces of the building blocks necessary to create life.

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The  Galaxy Makers were there with supercomputer simulations to test how galactic ingredients and violent events shape the life history of galaxies.

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Following a recipe I created my own galaxy which was given a code and could be brought to life using a hologram video, my smartphone and a plastic galaxy maker I was provided with. I can’t convey with a photo how cool this tiny spiral galaxy rotating over my phone screen is.

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From godlike galaxy gazing to immersive hurtling between the stars dodging between fronds of dark matter magically made visible by a virtual reality headset, Durham University had it covered.

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Space is full of dust. Stardust. On earth I believe it is mostly made up of dead skin cells. Jorge Otero-Pailos’ The Ethics of Dust is an impressive interaction with centuries of dust accumulation in Westminster Hall at the Houses of Parliament.

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Stripping the ancient walls of the patina of age, the build up from the passing through of countless dignitaries and ne’er do wells, onto a latex cast that is then hung like a skinned animal the length of the impressive hall.

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The surface is thick velvet, wrinkled like a newborn.

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and the birthmarks of provenance can be matched to those on the opposing wall.

Taking both her cue from and her place in history Mary Branson’s New Dawn light sculpture can also be found at the Houses of Parliament as a permanent addition to Westminster Hall, a site of many demonstrations calling for change.

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Inspired by the many hundreds of petitions made to the government by women fighting for a right to vote that lie furled in the archives of the chambers; the scrolls are  transformed to glass.

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The circles, that together form one large sun rising, change colour and pattern via a computer link to the monthly cycle of the pull of the moon on the waters of the Thames.

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Paid a worthwhile visit to Imperial College Sherfield Building Gallery to see Chud Clowes show Murmurations inspired  by analogies between the swirling clouds of migrating starlings flashing gold from their feathers and the gold of the rescue blankets offered to desperate migrants drawn to collective movement across borders.

Catching up with RCA Alumni and celebrating this years graduate show. The atmosphere was unfortunately tempered by the nation having hit the self destruct button on the previous day. A world turned upside down.(courtesy of Nayoun Kang)

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Despite some uplifting and inspiring work my thoughts were very distracted and so I only have a few images to share.

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Mollie Teane’s sunshine colours showing a multi-layered collision of cultures was just a reminder of the cultural poverty a brexit vote signals.

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Kristina Chan’s monumental monoprint to the slow time of geology

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and primordial instincts that even Hoyeon Kang’s simulated fire invokes serve as reminders of the tiny fragment of time we inhabit.

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Mayra Ganzinotti’s beautiful interplay of the body with crystals made me think of this grounding inscription,

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taking us back to the essence of ourselves.

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Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art presented Magical Surfaces: The Uncanny in Contemporary Photography, an exhibition that explored the uncanny as exemplified in the works of seven artists : Sonja Braas, David Claerbout, Elger Esser, Julie Monaco, Jörg Sasse, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld. For me it seemed more about the unreal than the uncanny.

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Queued theme park style (actually it wasn’t that long) to experience Yayoi Kusama’s mirror rooms next door at Victoria Miro for a brief 30 second immersion. Like entering the Tardis momentarily. The attraction may be triggering a primordial response to galaxy gazing that makes this reflected infinity so captivating.

More multiplicity and reflective surfaces with Sinéid Codd at Camberwell School of Art MA show.

This was a world caught between sci fi and the surreal. Inspired by the shapes and colours of gaudy jewellery it maintains that buoyancy of brash confidence found in oversized boldy faceted gemstones. Not afraid to be fake, like costume jewellery out-glitzing real diamonds. I saw clouds, a summer pavilion by the sea, here shapes morph into a world of shifting surfaces to drown in.

 

There was an inspiring look at the transformation of materials from Simon Starling at Nottingham Contemporary. This work explored the physical, poetic and metaphorical journeys of objects and materials. He considers transformation that can take place through the geographic, the economic and through time.

He is also interested in the physical properties of photography, which he has recast as sculpture through epic distortions of scale in The Nanjing Particles. Silver particles taken from 1875 photographs are enlarged a million times.

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Project for a Crossing is a new work where Simon Starling has built a boat out of magnesium extracted from the politically contested waters of the Dead Sea.

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After the exhibition he intends to use his magnesium boat to cross the Dead Sea – a fraught geopolitical journey that may only be partially possible since the Dead Sea lies between Jordan, Israel and the Israeli occupied West Bank.

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Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting from 1771-95  The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation, as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers is the subject for one of the series Recursive Plates. 

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Ephemeral daguerreotypes, created with a delicate chemical deposit on silver plated copper, that reflect back and hold within the same image.

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Phosphorus was discovered by accident in 1669 when Hennig Brand was boiling down thousands of litres of urine in his quest for the Philosopher’s Stone. It gave of an unearthly glow and then what a magical moment when phosphorus first ignited and the brilliant light filled the room.

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A few hundred years on and phosphorous, the 13th element to be discovered has been terribly misused as a cruel weapon.

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