Archives for posts with tag: Otobong Nkanga

below and beyond

August 11, 2025 //
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Thrilled to be invited to exhibit in Carbon, Carbon Everywhere at Hypha HQ co-curated by Indira Dyussebayeva-Ziyabek and Maria Hinel including artists Emii Alrai, Kate Daudy & Konstantin Novoselov, Simon Faithfull, Ania Mokrzycka, Nissa Nishikawa, Mariele Neudecker, Anousha Payne, Aimée Parrott, Lucia Pizzani, Lizi Sanchez, and Meng Zhou.

Integral to the constitution of our bodies, soil, air and some rocks, carbon is a highly bonding element that incessantly transmutes from state to state, each particle challenging the boundaries between life and non-life. Bringing together works by twelve international artists, Carbon, Carbon Everywhere explores the shifting states of carbon, an element that threads through organic and inorganic matter, linking bodies, environments, and temporal scales.

I have updated my website with documentation on the video installation Lithos Panoptes recently shown at Hypha HQ in The Geological Unconscious which can be viewed here. Referencing a many-eyed giant of Greek mythology, Argos Panoptes (always eyes still awake), the work considers the perpetual vigilance of rock as record keeper and witness.

Lithos Panoptes, optical lenses, wood, steel, two-way projection; Sculpture H172 x W170 x D50 cm, Rear projection screen H180 x W180 cm.

Great to be mentioned in an Art Newspaper article.

Magnetic News

Interesting to hear about new magnetic materials being developed that will hopefully have a less harmful ecological impact and offer more technological efficiency. The magnetic materials that are so heavily relied upon for computer memory and microelectronic devices include rare and toxic heavy elements whose energy-intensive production creates significant global carbon emissions. Previously, two primary types of magnetism had been identified, ferromagnetic (regular magnetism that we are familiar with) and antiferromagnetic (which are internally magnetic, but their opposing spin orientations make them appear non-magnetic externally).  A third form known as altermagnetism has recently been confirmed with around 200 altermagnetic materials already being identified. These materials have a distinct magnetic order where tiny magnetic fields created by electrons are in anti-parallel alignment within a rotation of the host crystal structure leading to unique electronic properties. Altermagnetic materials have the potential for technological advancements offering huge increases in speed and efficiency especially in spintronics, an advanced technology that leverages both the charge and spin of electrons to store and process information.

A permanent magnet, MagNex that does not use the rare earth elements which have sustainability and supply chain issues, was developed in just three months with the help of AI analysing thousands of potential alloys. ‍‍ “This could have a significant future impact on our net-zero ambitions, through renewable energy and low-carbon transport, by removing the need for rare earth elements in high-performance permanent magnets.”

Recently launched, NASA’s TRACERS mission satellites fly in low Earth orbit through the polar cusps, funnel-shaped holes in the magnetic field where solar activity causes magnetic field lines to disconnect and reconnect creating disruption in the magnetosphere. By strategic placing of the twin TRACERS spacecraft in Sun-synchronous orbit, so that they always pass through the Earth’s dayside, thousands of dayside reconnection events can be observed and compared between spacecraft to see how quickly the process changes and evolves. Better understanding magnetic reconnection and its effects in Earth’s atmosphere will help prepare for impacts of solar activity on Earth. The magnetosphere protects Earth from the constant bombardment of solar particles from the Sun, but when magnetic field lines are disrupted by the solar wind, particles rain down into Earth’s atmosphere not only causing beautiful phenomena, like the aurora, but also impacting infrastructure, like satellites and GPS systems.

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Out and About

I have been lucky to visit exhibitions in Finland and Norfolk to see works that interrogate human impact on the environment and other living beings that share our planet.

Helsinki Biennial 2025 Shelter: Below and Beyond, Becoming and Belonging brings together 37 artists and collectives on Vallisaari Island (which has been off-limits for human habitation for decades), in Esplanade Park, and at HAM (Helsinki Art Museum). It explores the significance of shelter and turns the gaze towards non-human nature. In the works, the focus shifts from humans to animals, water, plants, insects, minerals, and other living beings and their role as contributors to our planet’s wellbeing.

Artists with work installed in the Esplanade Park included Katie Holten (inventing a forest alphabet) and Guiseppe Penone (inseparable connections between humans and nature).

Artists at HAM (Helsinki Art Museum) included Jenni Laiti & Carl-Johan Utsi (precarity of survival), Regina de Miguel (technofossils), Aluaiy Kaumakan (displaced community), Otobong Nkanga (ownership of resources), Ingela Ihrman (invasive species), Locus/Thale Blix Fastvold & Tanja Thorjussen (eelgrass conservation), Sissel M Bergh (Sami cosmology), Edgar Calel (more than human agencies).

Artists with work installed around the beautiful Vallisaari Island included Hans Rosenström (petrified wood soundscape), Tue Greenfort (species evolution), Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas (amplifying non-human voices), Pia Sirén (human modified environments), LOCUS / Thale Blix Fastvold & Tanja Thorjussen (water health), Tania Candiani (hidden networks of the forest), Sara Bjarland (discarded inflatables), Kati Roover (humans and whales), Juan Zamora (bioluminescence), Band of Weeds (vegetal distress), Kristiina Koskentola (friendship of crows), Tamara Henderson (hidden realm of worms), Ernesto Neto (shapeshifting), Theresa Traore Dahlberg (invisible frequencies), Ana Teresa Barboza (plant narratives), Carola Grahn (colonialism legacy on estrangement from nature), nabbteeri (parasitism), Olafur Eliasson (more than human ways of seeing).

Excellent Monira Al Qadiri exhibition Deep Fate at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki. Addressing the dichotomy of enjoying contemporary life made possible by oil during the accelerating climate crisis. Deep Fate, refers to the origins of oil deep in the earth and also to the way that dependence on oil and breaking that dependence are a matter of life and death for humankind. Al Qadiri grew up next door to oil refineries in Kuwait and experienced the Gulf War as a child. This personal experience is drawn upon in the haunting video Crude Eye which attempts to reconcile childhood memories of the oil refinery as a romantic glowing metropolis with its true nature as a site of environmental destruction. The demise of the local pearl-diving industry, a source of income superseded by the oil boom, is referenced by sculptures echoing the molecular structures of the chemicals used in oil drilling with iridescent rainbow colours that are reminiscent of oil and the shimmering surface of pearls.

Also at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma was Rock, Paper, Scissors an anthology of diverse materials in contemporary art. Claes Oldenburg’s giant Extinguished Match which plays with scale brought to mind the video by David Hochgatterer Streichhölzer (Matches) where matches appear to spontaneously combust shown in the Carbon: Under Pressure exhibition recent tour to Glasgow ARC.

Materials celebrated through this exhibition included neural pathways stimulation of the visual system by pressure on the eyelids to see phosphenes, glittery thick folds of acrylic on canvas, leaded glass breakages, ephemeral copper wire net, faux marble that is actually hair on the barbers concrete floor.

With my head still full of the geological (unconscious) it was great to see the works of Alicja Kwade, Big Be-Hide (parallel universes – natural rock and a metallic copy either side of a two-way mirror) and Pars pro Toto (a part for the whole – stone planet like spheres) from the 2021 Biennial now installed in Helsinki’s Kalasatama district.

Another ‘geological’ delight was the unexpected appearance of stalactite’s forming in the tunnels of the military sea fortress built in the 1700’s on the island of Suomenlinna, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

I loved the amazing hive like wood floor at Suomenlinna boatyard. Every tree carries a memory of the past, recording the weather and conditions of each season. Dendrochronologists can work out exactly when a tree was cut down which is very helpful in underwater archaeology. Around Suomenlinna there are shipwrecks beneath the sea with no identifying features except their wooden timbers which incredibly hold clues to when and where the trees used were felled. Marine archaeologists, shipbuilders and forest scientists are working together to discover the stories behind the lost ships.

Helsinki is big on amazing libraries. The National Library of Finland is stunning and bursting with tantalizing books to explore, and the new Helsinki Central Library Oodi takes your breath away in its scale and sweeping curves.

Sadly Helsinki Observatory has long since stopped functioning as a place for active astronomical research (2009) and is now a museum. It was disappointing that the electronic cloud chamber they possess wasn’t switched on but there were some interesting instruments to wonder about in the meridian room.

Each day the time signal bag was hoisted to the top of a mast on the roof of the observatory just before noon and dropped down exactly at noon. The correct time having been determined by an astronomer observing the stars at night. This event could be seen from Helsinki Central Railway Station where the station clock was then synchronised. This method of time keeping for Helsinki residents was in use until the 1920’s.

The future of our oceans is explored in the Sainsbury Centre’s Can The Seas Survive Us?

The sea has often been viewed as a mysterious ‘other’, with its expansive surface and seemingly infinite depths dominating marine imagery in the history of Western art. Artworks in this exhibition explore the ways the oceans have been domesticated, reimagined on a bodily scale and brought inside to be tamed, contained or better understood. Sea Inside turns our oceanic gaze towards the sea’s more intimate spaces – whether physical, psychological or imaginary – and dives into shared watery origins, Indigenous ways of life and the items we remove from the sea to display on land.

A World of Water takes the North Sea and the historical relationship between Norfolk and the Netherlands as its starting point to look at the human impact on the sea. It was wonderful to see the original book Mundus Subterraneous from 1664 by Athanasius Kirschner whose geological illustrations and speculations I have been fascinated by. Olafur Eliasson’s suspended Shore Compass uses driftwood to reflect on navigation of an uncertain world. Some great maps in this exhibition including the intriguing map of sandbanks off the coast around Great Yarmouth. I have enjoyed following Julian Charriere’s visually dramatic work on Instagram so it was good to see these images scaled up. Andrew Watkinson’s montage based on research from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change about coastal erosion in Norfolk swerves from resignation to resistance, hope to despair and took me back to my BA dissertation (The Communication Of Ecological Concerns Through Contemporary Artistic Practice, 2007) writing about climate change warnings coming from the Tyndall Centre and the frustration of researchers about distorted media coverage that made it hard for the public to understand the facts. Suffolk too has lost a lot of land to the sea since I was a child there. Although dreams of tidal waves are common anxiety dreams I believe mine were also influenced by overheard stories of the North Sea flood of 1953 when a storm surge coincided with a high spring tide, which my parents and local villagers remembered vividly, it was the worst flood of the 20th century in England and Scotland and many lives were lost. Maggi Hambling’s sublime Wall of Water holds frozen the terrifying waves that may threaten us while Cian Dayrit’s Dam Nation examines the impact to communities and ecosystems when water is held back or re-routed.

Darwin in Paradise Camp by Japanese-Sāmoan artist Yuki Kihara calls out that ” a reconsideration of what it means to be human requires a re-evaluation of the origin of the species.”

Sea Inside turns our oceanic gaze towards the sea’s more intimate spaces – whether physical, psychological or imaginary including work by Marcus Coates (attempts to create the call of the humpback whale in a bathtub), Kasia Molga (How to make an Ocean – the artist’s salt tears fill miniature glass capsules where algae is cultivated), Gabriella Hirst (ethereal images on hand etched fibreglass in a slatted structure that echoes the baleen inside a whale’s mouth).

At London galleries I saw work about tuning in to invisible forces, the importance of how we treat our fellow humans (dead or alive) and an assessment of the influence of past and present technology on hope for the future.

Islington Gallery Weekend is a great idea, just the heat while out walking that weekend meant I didn’t make it to all the galleries participating.

The Observatory at Bobinska Brownlee New River, presented abstract and textural works by Claudio del Sole, an artist and amateur astronomer who co-founded the ‘Astralist’ movement in 1959 inspired by the dawn of the space age. These cosmic inspired works are shown alongside those made in response to the Astralist manifesto by contemporary artists James Brooks, Robert Good and D J Roberts. Cocktails and an incredible performance on the piano of unique work by composer Edward Henderson were also part of the afternoon.

Poignant work from Harriet Mena Hill in Curtains at PostROOM Gallery. Fragments collected from demolition of the Aylesbury Estate in South East London are meticulously painted with details of the buildings that once were home to a community. An accompanying film gives voice to those who enjoyed life here before lack of maintenance and social care slowly stripped away the heart and soul.

Fascinating listening to Tracy Hill speak about her work in Natural Frequencies at White Conduit Projects which explores ways of being sensitive to invisible energies that move through us and our landscapes. Her experience of working with a water diviner feeds into her intuitive drawing processes and cut paper works.

I was drawn to visit Gala Porras-Kim The categorical bind at Sprüth Magers to see these images which reminded me of the large hadron collider but made from marble. They are actually an examination of the conservation of marble tiled floors in Italy.

I remembered I had seen her work before at Gasworks and found it really interesting. In this piece she attempts to commune with the dead whose remains have ended up in a museum collection, possibly not where the living person had expected or would want.

Gala Porras-Kim

All Earth energy sources are known to come from the Sun

Brass, sunlight

Most of the works were coloured pencil drawings of museum collections, giving agency to objects and questioning categorisation – this one of the poor mole amulet made me think of my mole killer brother who suffers from arthritis.

It is fascinating to think about how humans experience sound and consider frequencies occurring outside the human spectrum of sensitivity that other animals may be able to hear. Also to think about sound as vibrating bodily rather than auditory sensation. Barbican Feel the Sound requires a willingness for interactivity to experience most of the exhibits. The instructions weren’t always clear and so it was at times a bit of a frustrating journey through the space.

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transformation

September 3, 2023 //
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Over the centuries many wind roses have been designed with varying numbers of wind directions from four to thirty-two cardinal points. The contemporary compass rose has its roots in the ancient classification of the winds.

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

Testing an inked collagraph for concrete casting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gallery visits

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

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

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

“Three quarks for Muster Mark!“

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading

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

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

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Reading Stones

October 13, 2019 //
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Reading stones could be considered the first instruments used to create an enhanced sensory experience. Originally made from ground and polished rock crystal or beryl, they were placed over texts to magnify them.

1909 reading stones

This early optical technology paved the way toward observation of the furthest reaches of the universe and its minutest components.

1909 Baetylus 2.jpg

Both the telescope and microscope are referenced by the sculpture Baetylus installed on St. Augustine’s Tower roof for the exhibition Reading Stones.

1909 Baetylus installed St Augustines Tower

Baetylus (meaning from the house of god), are sacred stones/meteorites of divine origin.

In this case sold to me for £6, a 15mm Nickel Iron Meteorite from Campo Del Cielo Argentina, falling 5000-6000 years ago. Photographed with a macro lens and direct to media printed onto acrylic by Genesis printing. The steel frame expertly welded by Nick Amott of J.& R. Precision Engineers.

1909 welding

The wind and rain on the roof soon added to the piece.

1909 Baetylus meteor shower

rain + meteor = meteor shower

An object falling through space distorts not only the space it travels through but also time as space and time are inexorably linked.

Each visit to the roof gave a different experience of the work.

1909 Baetylus 1

The act of “reading stones” can refer to both the scientific practice of geological investigation and the ritual of lithomancy which seeks to interpret the patterns of stones cast by those wishing to divine the future.

1909 Lithomancy reading

Offering ‘readings’ gave visitors a personal perspective to consider when thinking about how we experience time and negotiate the future. The board, a salvaged old table top was screen printed with a design created after researching the ancient art of lithomancy and prevalent variations. I gave the board a geological emphasis and aligned the areas of activity with traditional associations such as sedimentary = home, boulders = obstacles and challenges, strata = knowledge and experience.

1909 lithomancy board

The gemstones were assigned properties according to traditional meanings.

1909 assigning stones

It was magical to spend so much time within the thick stone walls of St. Augustine’s Tower, ascending and descending the steep narrow spiral stairs adding yet another infinitesimal trace to the worn history of the steps.

1909 St Augustine tower stairs

Working with Carol Wyss and Anne Krinsky on this project was a pleasure and we were delighted with the public response to the exhibition.

1909 Carol Wyss All that remains

Carol Wyss All That Remains 

“My aim is to re-create the original ‘UR’ bone which has neither gender nor race, the first ever bone which existed, the one which fell from heaven or space. It is an attempt at merging all the bones of the human skeleton into one entity, which then becomes the common denominator, the starting point from which all bones and consequently all humans came. I am referring to the bible story of Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib, the Greek myth of Pyrrha with the creation of humans from the stones / bones of the earth and Da Vinci’s perfectly proportional Vitruvian man, as well as to science’s search for the ultimate building blocks of our universe.” Carol Wyss

1909 Carol Wyss

1909 Carol Wyss Os

Carol Wyss Os

Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha were the only survivors of the great deluge and landed on Mount Parnassus, the only place spared by the flood.
Deucalion consulted an oracle of Themis about how to repopulate the earth. He was told to throw the bones of his mother behind his shoulder.
Deucalion and Pyrrha understood the “mother” to be Gaia, the mother of all living things, and the “bones” to be rocks.
They threw the rocks behind their shoulders, which soon began to lose their hardness and change form.
Their mass grew greater, and the beginnings of human form emerged.
The parts that were soft and moist became skin, the veins of the rock became people’s veins, and the hardest parts of the rocks became bones.
The stones thrown by Pyrrha became women; those thrown by Deucalion became men.

1909 Carol Wyss Osmosis

Carol Wyss Osmosis

All the sons of Adam are part of
One single body,
They are of the same essence.
When time afflicts us with pain
In one part of that body
All the other parts feel it too.
If you fail to feel the pain of others
You do not deserve the name of man.
― Saadi Shirazi 1258

1909 Anne Krinsky Ephemera Scrolls 2

Anne Krinsky Ephemera Scrolls

“I am interested in the ephemeral nature of the physical world – in the transformation of terrains and in the erosion of stone, wood and metal over time. In developing imagery for the Ephemera scrolls, I wanted to create visual relationships across time and space. I photographed the Tower’s clock mechanism and gravestones from the surrounding garden and other London churchyards. During a recent residency at Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany, I photographed the River Naab, as its water levels dropped during the hottest June on record. I feel impelled to document changes to wetlands and waterways in this time of accelerating climate change.” Anne Krinsky

1909 Anne Krinsky Ephemera Scrolls 1

Anne Krinsky Ephemera Scrolls

Time Crystals video work installed alongside the tower’s ancient clock builds on an interest in the mystery of time viewed across human, cosmological and quantum scales.

1909 St Augustines Tower Clock

The clock by which we measure time on our watches and digital devices is very misleading;
it is determined by the daily rotation of the Earth around its axis and its annual rotation around the sun.
This astronomical time is linear and regular.
But the actual clock by which we live our socioeconomic lives is an emergent phenomenon determined by the collective forces of social interaction:
it is continually and systematically speeding up relative to objective astronomical time.
– Geoffrey West, 2017

The patterns employed within the film and spilling out from the projection as 3D triangles mirror the crystal structure of the mineral beryl, commonly used to fashion the original reading stones.

1909 time crystals video still

The work also makes reference to the scientific theory of time crystals; a model which proposes a structure that repeats in time, as well as in space. Variations in perspective are manipulated through the speeding up, slowing down and overlapping of events to deconstruct a linear flow of time and interrogate the methods by which humans measure and experience this phenomenon.

It is within my mind then, that I measure time. I must not allow my mind to insist that time is something objective.
When I measure time, I am measuring something in the present of my mind. Either this is time, or I have no idea what time is.
― St. Augustine of Hippo, 397

1909 Time Crystals

How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet?
As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.
― St. Augustine of Hippo, 397

Using Carlo Rovelli’s book The Order Of Time as a reference guide and the quotes of St. Augustine as points of enquiry the repeating layered films were made using time lapse and slow motion; recording the exchange of energy as objects collide, heat up, cool down, travel at speed, transform, reflect and absorb, display traces of past events and embark on supposedly predictable trajectories. How we experience time is relative to where we are in the universe, our proximity to a larger mass and how fast we are moving.

 

A crystal is like a class of children arranged for drill, but standing at ease,
so that while the class as a whole has regularity both in time and space, each individual child is a little fidgety.
– Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, 1948

The fabric of the ancient building also helped determine the work installed. The 3D element of my video installation needed to be built in situ. One challenge was projecting in portrait mode to neatly fit the wall space between window and clock mechanism. Projectors are not supposed to be set on their side but with an adapted ceiling mount allowing clear air vents for the fan it all worked out fine.

1909 making triangles

Clamps, weights, stitching, balancing and non invasive means of installing had to be employed not to harm the Grade I listed heritage site.

1909 time crystals video installation detail

On location. After much searching a secret tower in the woods was found, knotted within dense undergrowth. Hidden in time and space.

1909 secret tower

Artlyst review of Reading Stones. by Jude Cowan Montague.

A pleasure to be asked back to Guest Projects for a filmed interview about my experience during the residency Laboratory of Dark Matters for a promotional video to launch Yinka Shonibare’s new residency programme opening in Lagos.

 

I attended the UK High Altitude Society Conference 2019 to give an update on the project aiming to launch a cloud chamber in a high altitude balloon.

1909 UKHAS 2019 2.JPG

Live Stream of conference presentations – my presentation at 3:30 in.

Very interesting talk from Michael Johnson on citizen space exploration & inflatable spacecraft, building on past developments of inflatable spacecraft from NASA new technology could see thousands of tiny spacecraft launched within days as opposed to decades.

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He also allowed us to hold the tiny spacecraft.

Finished working on video sculpture At a distance which has been installed at The Museum of Cornish Life, Helston for the Lizard Point Residency Touring Exhibition.

1909 at a distance install

This residency was inspired by an incredible communications double anniversary in 2019, for Lizard Lighthouse (400 years) and Goonhilly Earth Station (50 years: transmission of the first lunar landings), considering the importance of life-saving lighthouse beacons and internationally important transmissions across the sea and sky.

1909 Lizard Lighthouse

Lizard Point, overlooking the Atlantic, benefits from natural darkness, natural beauty and is a great spot for viewing the Moon, stars and meteor showers.

1909 Lizard Lighthouse 21909 LIGHTHOUSE beam

Staying on site, next door to the famous Lizard Lighthouse, artists had the opportunity to create works responding to the variety of astronomical sights found there, as well as be inspired by the rich communications heritage along this very special part of the SW coastal path.

Solitary figures using semaphore flags sign ‘We Are One’ out across the ocean; filmed on 29th March 2019 (the first date the UK was supposed to leave the EU).

1909 At a distance 1

As in entanglement theory where two paired electrons mirror each other at a distance it is hoped the message will be echoed back. The work looks at methods of communication over distance. It relates this to the mysterious twinning of electrons in quantum entanglement where particles link in a way that they instantly affect each other, even over vast distances, and which Einstein famously called ‘spooky action at a distance’. The video is back projected onto a Fresnel lens, the type found in lighthouses to increase luminosity of the lamps beam, another form of messaging over distance.

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The video sequences through five sets of semaphore messages. Each message is echoed back within a swirling force field emanating from across the ocean repeating the pattern of the flag representing entanglement. This is interspersed with imagery from video captured of the Lizard Point Lighthouse Lamp slowly waking and powering up from dim to dazzling light, split and mirrored in a circle of sending and receiving messages.

 

The Museum of Cornish Life is surprisingly vast and crowded with innumerable artefacts at every scale. A fearsome cider press the size of a lorry included. The long passage through the museum to the exhibition rooms encounters an overwhelming volume of items jostling for attention.

1909 Helston museum

Here are the records of events from which we infer the past.

While in Cornwall there was time for a quick visit to Tate St. Ives. An unexpected treat to find Otobong Nkanga’s excellent exhibition From Where I Stand looking at the glittery desirability of minerals and the scars left on the landscape and people by it’s extraction.

What could a monument be? Is it the thing we build or the thing we have taken away from? A place of emptiness is the monument to remind us there is no possibility of getting back to what has been – Otobong Nkanga

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