Archives for posts with tag: Rona Lee

mineral vision

July 5, 2025 //
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The Geological Unconscious had a wonderful six week run at Hypha HQ, Euston. Responding to Jason Groves’ inquiry into the mineral imaginary in his eponymous book, as well as the ‘Writing of Stones’ as proposed by writer and mineral collector Roger Caillois, the exhibition exposes the complex entanglements between the organic and the inorganic; the human and the lithic. 

Very happy to receive lots of positive feedback for my video installation Lithos Panoptes. People were very engaged with how the work reveals itself in stages, from the kaleidoscopic imagery displaying on the two way suspended screen to discovering the board of distorting lenses behind the screen and finally stepping back to see the original film from the human perspective before it is transformed by the lenses.

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. Video of human activity projected through distorting optical lenses transforms the anthropocentric position to imagine the perspective of the rock.

The pattern of lenses is informed by the molecular structure of magnetite, a mineral found in magma and metamorphic rock in Earth’s crust as well as in meteorites and the cells of organisms.

Through actual and metaphoric lenses, the relationship between the organic and non-organic is explored.

Lithos Panoptes 2025, Optical lenses, wood, steel, projector. Video 09:27 min Sculpture: H172 × W170 × D50 cm, Rear projection screen: H180 × W180 cm.

Photography by Benjamin Deakin

Mined magnetite is used in industrial and mechanical processes and its use in combustion engines and vehicle braking systems is releasing nanoscale pollutant particles into the air which are finding their way into human brain cells, vastly overwhelming the innate magnetite present, causing concerns linked to the development of degenerative brain diseases.

As well as referencing an ever watchful, many-eyed giant of Greek mythology, Lithos Panoptes also considers the numerous eyes (ocelli) of the chiton (a species of mollusc) whose rock crystal lenses have evolved over many millions of years to keep watch along rocky coastlines across the globe.

The only creature with eye lenses made of mineral and not protein, the chiton is also unique in having rows of teeth primed with magnetite which allow chomping on the hard rock surfaces it clings to. Some chiton’s teeth also contain the recently discovered mineral santabarbaraite, named after the mining district Santa Barbara in Italy where it was found – it is one of the few minerals named after a woman.

I was surprised to discover that the benedictions of Saint Barbara are still sought today, with shrines installed at tunnel entrances at Crossrail and even at CERN, the epicentre of scientific rigour. Before the boring machines were set in motion, services seeking her blessings were performed by local priests, with some even being winched down excavation shafts to carry out their duties.

Saint Barbara, who is associated with sudden death from fire, lightning and explosions, including military armaments, was adopted as patron saint of miners and tunnellers when the use of explosives in mining escalated during the 1600’s.

As the statues of Saint Barbara installed at these tunnel entrances are now buried, I have substituted images of my mother Barbara, coincidently born within hours of this Saint’s Day, in my video installation Lithos Panoptes.

Tucked into a dark recess of the gallery, Belly of a Rock suggests an imagined place of chemical conversations at the intersection of the organic and inorganic. A hybrid between rock, mollusc and technology this video sculpture responds to an early lifeform’s emerging self-awareness, desire to communicate and urge to create as described by Italo Calvino in his story ‘The Spiral’. We don’t always know what we are creating.

Thrilled to show these works alongside Julie F Hill @juliefhill, Rona Lee @ronaleeartist, Charlie Franklin @charlie__franklin and Deborah Tchoudjinoff @deboraht_ff

Julie F Hill’s sculptural print installation Parent Body uses scanning electron microscope imagery of samples recently returned from asteroid Bennu. The cave-like entrance, provides an embodied experience of the data and invites intimate contemplation of expanded scales. The ambiguous rock-like yet flowing forms echo the words of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen ‘stone is fluid when viewed within its proper duration’. Hill’s miniature work Return, considers the chemical and molecular cross exchanges between earth and space and in a gesture of reverse sample return (scientific missions and human extractive processes both take), a bead of Iridium is returned to the belly of asteroid Itokawa. Her small-scale embroidery work Water and Night, is based on observational studies of moonlight on water, continuing her explorations of water as the eye of landscape as proposed by Gaston Bachelard.

Julie F Hill, Parent Body, physically manipulated soy-ink print on tissue, chalk and clay pigments, chrome metal, water, clamp, funnel. c. W3 × H2.2 × D2.5m. 2025. Return, 3d print of asteroid Itokawa cast in plaster-of-paris, Iridium, 20 ×11× 8mm. 2024. Water and Night, silver metalized embroidery thread, 5.3 ×11 cm. 2025

 Photography Julie F Hill (1+3) Benjamin Deakin (2)

Deborah Tchoudjinoff’s moving image installation work The City of Gold (with sound in collaboration with Joe Farley) considers vast, beyond human, geological timescales when continents have once again become as one. Starting as a short fiction text, Deborah began to form an imagined world of cities in a future Amasia. The fictional cities are named after minerals that are heavily sought – rare earths, copper, uranium, gold, and coal – hinting at a narrative of an Earth depleted of the resources we rely on. The City of Gold is one of the five imagined cities. In a world where these natural resources are no longer, she questions what it would look like and who would be the inhabitants.

Deborah Tchoudjinoff, The City of Gold, video with sound, sculptural installation, 2m × 4m × 2m. 2025.

Photography B J Deakin (1) Julie F Hill (3)

For Litho/Domous Rona Lee has chosen to work with book plates originating in the post-war period of the ‘great acceleration’ – a time in which population numbers, use of natural resources, popular consumerism, technological dependency and environmental degeneration burgeoned. Unified in their varying representations of the geologic but broking no contradiction between their celebration of extractive processes such as tourism and industrialisation and idealisation of the ‘wild’, the images selected by Lee conjure a pre-fall world in which imaginaries of lithic instability are firmly suppressed.

Two handfuls of silt (the residue of scientific samples collected at a depth of 4,000 meters), squeezed into the artist’s hands, fired and then gilded, form Rona Lee’s I want, I want, I want (2012), the title of which references William Blake’s engraving of the same name, wryly conjures the possibility of reaching down into the ocean’s depth, as though into a rock pool, while simultaneously cautioning against the folly and voracity of such ambitions.

Rona Lee, Litho/Domous, light panels, bookplates. 2025. I want, I want, I want, fired and chromed handfuls of sediment, 2012.

Photography B J Deakin

The sculptures presented by Charlie Franklin, Landform and FRAGS, are lumpy, solid looking forms that speak of geological debris or ruins. All three pieces were soaked in the waters of the North Sea, on the easterly edge of the UK. This process allowed the natural elements to determine their individual patination or colouring, along with indentations and scuffs, where materials have been worn away by salt and stone. Cave Drawings (Aladdin’s Cave, Series of Grottos, Marble Curtain, Fairy Grotto, and Solomon’s Temple) are a series of five found postcards depicting the caves at Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, UK which have been hand coloured by the artist. Franklin is interested in how the addition of colour can provoke a personality or aura within each cave interior, allowing for grand experiments to be realised on an intimate scale.

Charlie Franklin, Landform, Cardboard, found fabric, gaffer tape, gouache, scrim, plaster, adhesive, acrylic paint, copper leaf, sea water residue, 87 × 26 × 30cm. 2025. Cave Drawings, felt tip on found postcards, 14 × 9cm. 2025. FRAGS, cardboard, rope, gaffer tape, scrim, oil paint, aluminium leaf, plaster, adhesive, acrylic paint, copper leaf, seawater residue, work in two parts, 29 × 22 × 28cm / 12 × 29 × 23cm. 2025.

Photography B J Deakin, Julie F Hill

A highlight of our events was an Urban Geology Walk led by geologist Ruth Siddall.

“The gravel pit, like other mining holes, is the reverse image of the cityscape it creates — extraction in the aid of erection.” Lucy Lippard

Ruth lead a group walk to explore the geology of the local built environment around Regent’s Place and Fitzrovia. Her knowledge of geology is astounding and her passion for stone infectious. Everyone came away incredulous, having their eyes opened to the deep time history of the rocks that build our city. The deep, black, Archaean dolerite from Mashonaland in Zimbabwe that Ruth points to is 2.2 billion years old. The large block of polished stone shaped like a giant pebble, itself crammed with pebbles of other rocks, is a sculpture by John Aiken, Monolith & Shadow. A patchwork of Jurassic limestone from southern Spain is crowded with the spire-shaped fossil shells of the gastropod Nerinea, stained red and yellow with ochres.

After the walk Ruth joined us for a tour of the gallery – it was fantastic to hear her insight and corroboration on some of the research that fed into the artworks.

I offered Lithomancy drop-in sessions on Friday afternoons as part of a programme of events for The Geological Unconscious. Visitors were invited to throw gemstones with specially assigned characteristics onto a wooden board divided into geologically themed sections. They are then given personal interpretations based on the position of the cast stones by drawing from the esoteric ritual of lithomancy which seeks to divine the future from the reading of stones.

This performative experience proposes insights into the power and allure of stones emanating from the symbolic meanings attributed to them and exposes the entangled relations between the human and the geologic found in our language and desire to align the human condition with the lithic.

We had many interesting visitors to The Geological Unconscious and have made some wonderful new contacts. Not least among these was meeting Melanie Wheeler who has recently completed a residency in the UCL Geology Department where she worked with the technician to re-curate the rock room. Julie and I were lucky to be taken on a tour of the newly curated collection and receive gifts. So excited to have a beautiful sample of magnetite.

In ancient Greek, magnetite was known as “magnes lithos,” meaning “stone from Magnesia” – the region in Thessaly, Greece, where magnetite was first discovered, supposedly by a shepherd who noticed the nails in his boots were sticking to the rock under his feet.

As an additional daily drop in activity during The Geological Unconscious we offered cheong tasting. Chef Moonhyung Lee explored human-mineral entanglements through digestion using stones to create cheong (Korean fermented syrup). The use of weighing stones helps create the environment for preservation, a process which amplifies the bioavailability of minerals in food. Moonhyung Lee is a food designer with a background in graphics. She is currently based in London and works at zero waste restaurant Silo.

It was great to have so many people join us for our Closing Event artist talks and the launch of the exhibition publication with preface by Jason Groves and short essay by Ruth Siddall.

We also had the microscope set up at the closing event to look at some crystal growth in solutions prepared by Julie who works extensively with crystals.

I had tried some ‘Vitamin C’ crystal growing microscopy experiments at home. These images use a polarising filter under the microscope to reveal the vibrant colours. Next step will be to set up a timelapse of the crystals growing.

Summer Solstice 2025. The shortest night of the longest day brought an awful darkness. Collected the last two solargraphs I had installed at the Hogsmill Nature Reserve. These have been collecting light from the sun for a whole year, recording every sunrise and sunset. May the light shine through.

I was delighted that my video Cosmic Chiasmus: crossing the universe was included in CARBON: Under Pressure, at the Mazumdar-Shaw Advanced Research Centre as part of Glasgow Science Festival 2025, in a special exhibition partnership with Science Gallery Bengaluru.

The video offers a glimpse into a subatomic world where cosmic rays travel from distant galaxies to collide and silently interact with atoms and technology on Earth. Alongside the screening of the video I was also invited to give an artist talk and cloud chamber demonstration. It was great to share the wonders of the cloud chamber with visitors who were able to see cosmic ray trails for themselves.

It is an incredible journey that cosmic rays make, blasted across space, spiralling along magnetic field lines to end up entangled with carbon in our bodies.

Not only is all life physically permeated by cosmic rays with the potential for nuclei collisions, but some cascading particles smash into atoms of nitrogen and combine with oxygen to create radioactive carbon-14 which enters our atmosphere. Plants absorb it during photosynthesis, and it is incorporated into their carbon skeleton, which we then eat. While plants and animals are alive, carbon-14 is continually replenished as the organism takes in air or food. But when an organism dies no more carbon-14 is absorbed and that which is present starts to decay at a constant rate. By measuring the radioactivity of dead organic matter, the current carbon-14 content can be determined and the time of death established. Cosmic ray activity gives us carbon dating techniques.

Reading

The Geological Unconscious – Jason Groves. Returning to this book that sparked the ideas we explored in our exhibition. A redirection of geology to consider a type of connection between things that are not in themselves geologic. Stones that stare, stones that speak. An image of the human could develop through geologic processes, becoming part of the mineral consciousness. Quoting Heather Sullivan ‘There is a difficulty for biology and philosophy to maintain a reliable distinction between life and non-life.’

The Writing of Stones – Roger Caillois. A paean to the capacity of minerals to form images within the imagination, which in turn is considered to be nothing more than an extension of matter.

The Performances of Sacred Places: crossing, breathing, resisting – edited by Silvia Battista. I read this for some background research while thinking about how I might make work responding to the abandoned sites of the cosmic ray detector huts at Haverah Park on the North Yorkshire Moors.

‘An horizon stands, in modern hermeneutics, for what is possible to see from the position of a specific observer. That is, not only a location in space but also a position in the cultural and historical apprehension of the world.’ Silvia Battista

The book opens by questioning relationships between the site and its ascribed attributes, which may be mercurial qualities not easy to define or quantify. It reflects on the performativity theories of Karen Barad which argue that matter, in its complexity, is an active participant in our relationship to the world and Jane Bennet’s call to recognise the ‘vitality of matter’ that crosses the human non human divide. In the section on ‘crossing’ the sensitive work of Louise Ann Wilson explores ritual around death, grief and loss through walking in rural locations echoing walking an interior landscape of memory. Walking the labyrinth and the pilgrimage are also considered as journeys that take place in physical and metaphysical space.

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The Geological Unconscious

June 10, 2025 //
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‘What truth could be more unexpected ….than the one in which the mineral envisions while also being envisioned.’ Jason Groves, The Geological Unconscious

‘This is the blueprint of nature itself; both hidden and revealed in a nodule of silica.’
Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones

The Geological Unconscious opened with an exceptionally busy Private View. It was a fantastic evening with lots of great feedback. With a multi-disciplinary approach, large-scale installations and sculptural works sit alongside embroidery, video, expanded print and photographic work, to create material intimacies that help situate us in scales beyond the human.

My video installation Lithos Panoptes imagines a view of the world from the perspective of the rock via the molecular structure of magnetite. 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.

Video of human activity projected through distorting optical lenses transforms the anthropocentric position to imagine the perspective of the rock.

Magnetite is a mineral found in magma and metamorphic rock in Earth’s crust as well as in meteorites. Magnetite nanoparticles are also found naturally in organisms and are known to aid magnetoreception, a
means whereby animals and birds orientate themselves by sensing polar direction.
Through these actual and metaphoric lenses the relationship between the organic and non-organic is explored. Imagery includes allusions to scientific research into the dramatic overwhelming of innate magnetite in human brain cells by nanoscale pollutant particles of magnetite released into the air by traffic; the unique qualities of the chiton, a mollusc with hundreds of tiny eyes made from rock rather than biological material and teeth primed with magnetite and containing recently discovered mineral santabarbaraite; Saint Barbara, patron saint of miners and tunnellers, adopted when the use of explosives in mining escalated in the 1600’s and whose benedictions are still sought today with shrines installed at tunnel entrances at Crossrail and even at CERN, the epicentre of scientific rigour.

Also showing the video sculpture Belly of a Rock – describing an imagined place of chemical conversations at the intersection of the animate and inanimate. Under a crusted shell, surfaces slide and scrape along lines of fissure, distended innards ooze and rocks moan as they are distorted by untold pressure. The turbulent spiralling of the molten core births rock and lifeforms which are acted upon by the drag of an oscillating magnetic field.

Julie F Hill’s large-scale sculptural print installation Parent Body, uses scanning electron microscope imagery of samples recently returned from asteroid Bennu. The data features detail of carbon-rich and organic ‘nano-globules’ which have been theorised as ‘proto-cells’. The sculpture evokes astro-geological-biological material lineages across deep space and cosmological time. In a contrast of scale, Julie is also showing Return, 3d print of asteroid Itokawa cast in plaster-of-paris with a bead of Iridium. Iridium is an rare-earth element more abundant in asteroids than the Earth’s crust. This miniature work considers the cross exchanges between space and earth and in a gesture of reverse sample return (scientific missions and human extractive processes both take), a bead of Iridium is returned to the belly of asteroid Itokawa.

Charlie Franklin’s work considers control, physical experience and memory within the natural landscape. Her research includes how formations such as standing stones, grottos and geological debris remain or change across time. With a particular interest in materials and the properties they hold, she is experimental in her approach to making. Everyday items including cardboard, plastic sheeting and gaffer tape are repurposed to build the foundations of her sculptural work. Franklin also collects found imagery such as postcards and photographs, which she reworks to become something else.


In Litho/Domous, Rona Lee layers photographic plates from mass produced ‘coffee table’ books onto lighting panels, utilising the ‘bleed’ between them that this reveals, to evoke the tectonic instabilities of
contemporary eco relations. Originating in the post war ‘golden age of capitalism’, and designed as statement pieces for home display, the aspirational focus of these image-rich publications on culture, travel, landscape, can be said to prefigure the arc of the smartphone in making the world consumable. At the same time titles such as The Mineral Kingdom and Library of Nations speak to the legacies of the Enlightenment project, offering up an order of things in which Mankind / the Anglophone world is positioned as ascendant and Nature – along with ‘other’ cultures – is ‘put on the table’.

Deborah Tchoudjinoff’s video installation The City of Gold takes a speculative look at Earth in the far future. Her work considers vast, beyond human, geological timescales where continents have once again become one. Past supercontinents create room to speculate upon future ones if we understand Earth as shifting, moving matter. Starting as a short fiction text Tchoudjinoff began to form an imagined world of cities in a future supercontinent of Amasia. The fictional cities named after the minerals that are heavily sought – rare earths, copper, uranium, gold, and coal – hinting at the narrative of an Earth depleted of the resources we rely on. The City of Gold is one of five imagined cities.

An accompanying events programme includes an urban geology walk with Geologist Ruth Siddall, discussing the origins of the local built environment; Cheong tasting by chef Moonhyung Lee who explores human-mineral entanglements through digestion; a crystal growing workshop led by Julie F Hill and I will be offering visitors lithomancy readings every Friday afternoon. The reading of stones proposes insights into the power and allure of stones emanating from the symbolic meanings attributed to them and exposes the entangled relations between the human and the geologic found in our language and desire to align the human condition with the lithic.

Once I start thinking of minerals as something we swallow to make our body function, I also start to think of how our body comes to be composed of these minerals, and that when we gradually decay after death we become mineral components again. So, the gesture of swallowing a tablet or vitamin pill is as magical, or let’s say as supernatural, as we want, because we really are swallowing a stone. – Otobong Nkanga

Link to Marina Walker essay The Writing of Stones published by Cabinet Magazine.

London once had many stones. They made convenient landmarks for gatherings and councils, or else marked boundaries or distances. As a result, they often crop up in place names – Link to The Londonist ‘Lost Stones of London’.

Gallery visits

Mónica Alcázar-Duarte in Cultural Reforesting Exhibition at Orleans House Gallery. In this exhibition, the artists remind us that we not only have a relationship with nature but also that we are nature. We are human animals. Together, with our more-than-human neighbours, we are a growing, singing, howling forest. 

Under the big Suffolk skies of Orford Ness. Walking landscape that bears the scars, physical and emotionally resonant, of years of intense military top secret experiments. Here radar was developed, the aiming of bombs was refined, material vulnerability was tested with destructive, explosive projectiles under simulations of attack and famously it is the site of environmental tests during the late 50’s, early 60’s, in the development for detonation of the atomic bomb. 

The weight of the shingle shored up around the buildings and on the roofs used to dampen the explosions.

There is a lot to respond to. It is now a spectacular nature reserve but apparently not so many birds here this year. We were lucky to see a short eared owl hunting and some gangly spoonbills in flight.

Kaori Homma Silent Echoes at The Watch House, Orford Quay – Inspired by Orford Ness, the UK’s only site of atomic experimentation, this exhibition explores the hidden histories and lingering memories within its landscape. Through the unconventional method of Aburi dashi or fire etching, the artist explores not only the visible remnants of the secret history of Orford Ness, but also the unspoken memories that linger in the air. Unlike ordinary drawings made by the pigments on the surface of paper, Homma’s works are made by fire which etches the images into the body of paper as a burn mark.

Electric Dreams at Tate Modern celebrates the early innovators of optical, kinetic, programmed and digital art, who pioneered a new era of immersive sensory installations and automatically-generated works. This major exhibition brings together ground breaking works by a wide range of international artists who engaged with science, technology and material innovation. 

Desmond Paul Henry used a repurposed bombsight computer, designed to drop bombs more accurately, as developed at Orford Ness, to make a drawing machine which he then hand embellished.

The Pleasure of Misuse curated by Indira Dyussebayeva-Ziyabek and Maria Hinel at Royal Society of Sculptors. ‘The humour that springs from manipulating or referencing the mundane is paradoxically self-reflexive – appropriated objects suddenly appear anthropomorphic, our laughter becomes directed at ourselves and the intermittent absurdity of the human condition. The Pleasure of Misuse explores the mechanics and psychology of humour in the everyday, considering its potential to heal and its power to disarm, creating the sense of complicity and the space for self-reflection amid these anxious times.’

Images – Andy Holden, Ty Locke, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Cornelia Parker, Richard Wentworth

Samuel Zealey, Angela Eames, Tony Fleming, Charlotte Guerard, John Strutton and Kate Fahey in Heavenly Skeletons at Coleman Project Space – six contemporary artists whose work repositions drawing as an expanded multidisciplinary field.  Heavenly Skeletons is a dynamic investigation of how drawing translates abstract concepts into tangible form… 

Gorgeous show with thoughtfully chosen works that like Samuel Zealey’s vertiginous sculpture balance perfectly.

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encompassing a spectrum

May 12, 2025 //
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It has been a busy few weeks preparing for The Geological Unconscious at Hypha HQ – a group exhibition, co-curated by Julie F Hill and myself, exploring themes of stone consciousness and human-mineral encounters, destabilising assumptions about passive matter and a stable Earth.

Image: From Roger Caillois’ stone collection: Malachite, masque africain, République démocratique du
Congo, 14 × 20.5 × 6 cm. Photographed in the Museum of Natural History, Paris by Julie F Hill.


Responding to Jason Groves’ inquiry into the mineral imaginary in his eponymous book, as well as the ‘Writing of Stones’ as proposed by writer and mineral collector Roger Caillois, the exhibition exposes the complex entanglements between the organic and the inorganic; the human and the lithic. The Geological Unconscious is viewed through disruptive Surrealist strategies, engagements with the aesthetics of geo-materiality and material processes that attend to the growth and transformation of matter. These artistic ‘excavations’ highlight the toll of extractive industries on our planet, whilst inspiring reverence for the geological lineages of deep, cosmic time. Theories of Animism and Panpsychism are also brought to
bear on ways of attributing agency to inorganic realms.

I am thrilled to be exhibiting with Julie F Hill, Charlie Franklin, Rona Lee and Deborah Tchoudjinoff.


An accompanying events programme includes an urban geology walk with Geologist Ruth Siddall, discussing the origins of the local built environment; an installation and tasting by chef Moonhyung Lee who explores human-mineral entanglements through digestion; a crystal growing workshop led by Julie F Hill and I will be offering visitors lithomancy readings every Friday afternoon.

Investigating human/mineral entanglements for new work to be installed at Hypha HQ for The Geological Unconscious. Video of human activity projected through distorting optical lenses transforms the anthropocentric position to imagine the perspective of the rock. The pattern of lenses is informed by the molecular structure of magnetite,

Magnetite is a naturally magnetic mineral found in many organism’s cells including human brain cells. Mined magnetite is used in industrial and mechanical processes and its use in combustion engines and braking systems is releasing nanoscale pollutant particles from traffic into the air which are finding their way into brain cells in high percentages causing concerns with links to degenerative brain diseases. I have been filming the stop start constant stream of traffic at a local roundabout and made a cast of a brain in gelatine with suspended iron filings. The filings oxidised and so the brain took on an iron red tinge and after a few days it cleaved down the centre and gradually as it dried became more and more chiton like.

Chitons are remarkable molluscs that have changed little in hundreds of millions of years. The chiton has hundreds of tiny eyes in its shell, which is made of eight articulating plates. It is the only known creature with lenses made of minerals rather than protein. Another distinctive feature of the chiton is having rows of teeth primed with magnetite, which aid its homing capabilities through magnetoreception and allow chomping on the hard rock surfaces it clings to. Inside the teeth of some species, the mineral santabarbaraite has been found, named after Santa Barbara, a mining district in Italy where it was first discovered and that honours Saint Barbara, who is the patron saint of mining and tunnelling. Santabarbaraite is also one of the few minerals named after a woman.

Fantastic day chiton hunting in the rockpools on the stunning East Sussex coast. Thanks to family who helped find these well camouflaged unique creatures.

Saint Barbara, was adopted by miners and underground workers as patron saint after the pursuit of geology and the widespread use of gunpowder in mining escalated in the 1600’s. She may have a dubious authenticity but her benedictions are still sought today with many statues installed at the entrances to Crossrail and a large ceremony on her saints day, 4th December, performed by local priests before tunnelling went ahead. Even at CERN the epicentre of scientific rigour, a shrine to Saint Barbara was established at every shaft site of the Large Hadron Collider requiring excavation and a blessing performed even if the priest had to be lowered by crane down the shaft to achieve this.

My mother’s name was Barbara and her birthday 6th December is very close to Saint Barbara’s day on the 4th. It would be great to discover she arrived two days late but there is no one alive now to ask.

Small grains of magnetite are common in igneous rocks, formed from magma having cooled and solidified within the Earth’s crust, and also in metamorphic rock, formed when existing rock is transformed physically or chemically at extreme temperatures. 

These processes happen on other planets as well as Earth and so magnetite has also been found in meteorites.

Using a digital microscope to look at the structure of the chondrite meteorite NWA 16975 discovered in the Sahara in 2024 which displays numerous and obvious chondrules and flecks of nickel iron in a fine grained matrix.

Also the fragment I have from the Diogenite meteorite NWA 7831 found in Morocco in 2013.

Looking at wonderfully colourful geological maps of Greece to locate the ancient area of Magnesia – the region where magnetite was first discovered and where its name has derived from – known as “magnes lithos” (stone from Magnesia). Definitely want to plan a research trip to this beautiful region around Thessaloniki.

Exhibitions

Whatshesaid collective of artists present Terra Incognita at Thames-side Studios Gallery – charting and cataloguing the disregarded, the everyday, its surface textures, accumulations, sedimentations.

Joao Villas and Victoria Ahrens showing in Spectral Matters at APT Gallery An understated beautifully curated show whose work references the ephemeral materiality of sound, video, photography and print. The work overlaps and crosses over, both artists responding to the other’s practice. The images create matter, as spectral matter gives agency to the materiality of its own making, while haunting the space with its frequency- it vibrates. The exhibition explores memory, technology and the Anthropocene- and how the disappearing materiality of the world is captured through ephemeral means. 

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correlation

February 9, 2025 //
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 ‘What truth could be more unexpected ….than the one in which the mineral envisions while also being envisioned.’  Jason Groves, The Geological Unconscious

Speculating on a view of the world projected from the perspective of the rock. In the studio drilling more holes for optical lenses set out in a pattern based on the crystal structure of the naturally magnetic mineral magnetite which was determined in 1915 as one of the first crystal structures to be obtained using X-ray diffraction. Found in igneous rocks, sedimentary deposits and sand across the globe in many locations, magnetite is also found in the cells of organisms from bacteria to humans. Magnetite contains both ferrous (divalent) and ferric (trivalent) iron along with oxygen.

Testing projecting through the optical lenses I’m excited to see how the different lenses cause images to overlap and distort.

I received a Digital Microscope for my birthday and a selection of rocks and meteorites to look at. So far I have only used the lens with the least magnification capabilities yet this is revealing wonderful detail in the rocks which are further enhanced by using a polarising filter. I have chosen to look at rocks which originate near areas of tectonic activity or that may have magnetite in them.

Images on left have no filter, those on the right have a polarising filter.

This thin slice of Deep Ocean Pebble was collected in 1979 three miles deep in the Pacific Ocean Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone. This zone is regularly considered for deep-sea mining due to the abundant presence of manganese nodules. In 2016, investigation of the seafloor in the zone was found to contain an abundance and diversity of life – more than half of the species collected were new to science.

This slice of Lewisian Gneiss is 3 billion years old. These ancient rocks from the Isle of Lewis were caught up in a mountain building cycle roughly 490–390 million years ago and were pushed above younger rocks formed during the late stages of this tectonic event.

This slice of Olivine Basalt comes from Þingvallavatn, a rift valley lake in southwestern Iceland. The area is covered by lava. The cracks and faults around the lake is where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates meet. This may be the only place where one can stand with two feet on two different tectonic plates. The sample is a mid oceanic ridge basalt (MORB) fine grained but consisting of small olivine, clinopyroxene fragments in ground mass dominated by plagioclase laths, an opaque magnetite.

This slice of Vesicular Basalt Lava – a type of lava that solidifies into a rock with trapped gas bubbles leaving small holes as the lava cools, comes from the Mid Atlantic Ridge near the Azores Islands.

I also have a piece of Jepara taken from a pallasite, a class of stony–iron meteorite, discovered in Indonesia in 2008 during building excavations. The outside is heavily weathered but when cut and polished the inside reveals a translucent structure of densely packed olivine and magnetite. The sample has been coated with acrylic which has surface scratches so I think some of the detail has been compromised but it is still beautiful. No filters used here.

I am making use of public access to historical magnetograms recording of Earth’s magnetic declination to feed into new work inspired by palaeomagnetism. Magnetic studies of the ocean in the 1950’s had determined that the ocean floor was covered by bands of magnetic stripes that varied between normal polarity and reversed polarity. The Earth’s magnetic field has reversed polarity many times over the past hundreds of millions of years. These magnetic stripes were found to be symmetrical on the ocean floor about the mid-oceanic ridge. In 1963 British scientists, Fred Vine and D. H. Matthews proposed that the magnetic striping was caused by paleomagnetism, the storing of Earth’s ancient magnetic field in the sedimentary rocks that were forming as lava spewed up and spread across the ocean floor setting the history of pole reversals in stone.

I have embarked on some crystal growing experiments using a seed crystal in a saturated solution of mono-ammonium phosphate and aluminium potassium sulphate. I am hoping these might become objects to view through a lovely old wooden magnifying box I have. The last time I experimented with crystals was when I was amazed by the speed and glut of salt crystals overwhelming the test area. Before that made a time lapse video over 5 days of crystal growth for the installation Time Crystals in Reading Stones at St. Augustine’s Tower 2019. I will be learning more about this as workshops are developed for The Geological Unconscious public engagement programme which will run alongside the exhibition at Hypha HQ Euston this coming spring. Both Julie F Hill and Sophie Mei Birkin work with crystal structures and growth in their own practices and will be leading on the workshops we will run in partnership with a local primary school.

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

Had some studio fun testing the possibilities of magnetic putty for future video ideas. Mesmerising the way it very slowly swallows the magnet.

I began the magical process of making copper ink. Soaking pieces of copper in vinegar and salt, stirring daily and watching the liquid turn a milky turquoise blue. Looking forward to using this to patinate copper but also to paint with on paper.

Experimenting winding a copper wire around an iron nail and connecting the wire to a battery cell. A magnetic field is generated around the nail which stays for a little while after the nail is removed from the coil. I used a 9v battery and large nail– it wasn’t a very strong magnet – a welding stick was better and seemed to retain the magnetic field for longer but in both cases the battery got very hot. I had hoped to maybe develop this idea to magnetise a sculpture threaded with iron. Needs more investigation.

I have been exploring the updated Digital Materials Library at the Institute of Making which led me to the Mindsets website which has some cool magnetic materials for sale. Future experiments upcoming.

Exploring paper weaving patterns with a view to reinventing past works while thinking about ideas of cosmic planes in The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, a 1909 text by Max Heindel. This text, setting out a theory of seven Worlds and seven Cosmic Planes, supposes an intermingling of spirit with matter where the intersection of the material and metaphysical world are not one above another in space, but inter-penetrate each with the other.

Astonishing that the preserved remains of the ancient kauri trees of New Zealand, alive over 42,000 years ago, can reveal the time of the last significant magnetic pole excursion within their rings. During what is known as ‘The Laschamps Excursion’, the north and south magnetic poles swapped places for about 500-800 years before swapping back again. During a magnetic pole reversal the magnetic field weakens so many more cosmic particles reach the surface of Earth. This means much more Carbon-14 is produced in the atmosphere and absorbed by plants.

Changes in radiocarbon levels were recorded from four ancient kauri logs found buried in peat swamps which seals them in a chemically balanced environment. Through high precision carbon dating processes at the University of Waikato in New Zealand the scientists discovered the most dramatic time was the lead-up to the reversal, when the poles were migrating across the Earth and our magnetic field practically disappeared, leaving life here very vulnerable to cosmic radiation. It appears, this weakening 42,000 years ago, in combination with a period of low solar magnetic activity – captured in evidence from ice cores, caused damage to the ozone layer and disrupted atmospheric conditions impacting the global climate so that devastating environmental changes took place. The research team links this climate change to extinction events which occurred at the same time, Neanderthals vanishing from Europe, and a proliferation of cave paintings appearing in Europe and Asia as humans find shelter from the turbulent weather and increased electrical storms. They have dubbed this period of excursion ‘The Adams Event’ in honour of Douglas Adams who wrote in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy that ‘42’ was the answer to life, the universe, and everything

Tane Mahuta – ‘Father of the Forest’ (Waipoua Kauri Forest)

Studio Visits

Julie F Hill and I have been visiting the other artists participating in the upcoming exhibition The Geological Unconscious at Hypha HQ Euston. We are so happy to be working with Charlie Franklin who considers control, physical experience and memory within the natural landscape, Deborah Tchoudjinoff who considers what the form is through the process of material and visual experimentations, Rona Lee who centres on the politics and aesthetics of Geo-materiality along with the human /more than-human entanglements of contemporary life and Sophie Mei Birkin who investigates the generative potential in the transformation of matter through a variety of material processes such as growing salt crystals and exploring amorphous and decomposing substances.

I have also been lucky to have Charly Blackburn and Victoria Rance visit my studio to chat about our respective work and shared interests. Charly is beginning a period of research into rare earth materials and extractive processes and we share a fascination with things magnetic. Victoria came to chat about our shared interest in the sun but is also interested in magnetic fields and the potential they offer for brain to brain communication.

Gallery Visits

Haegue Yang Leap Year at Hayward Gallery. With colourful works festooned by garlands of bells and strewn with fairy lights this was a perfect show for the festive period. Folklore, surrealism and ritual, collage and costumes combine with the modern domestic/utilitarian in hybrid works that have a playful carnival air.

Thoughtful works beautifully presented Each Place Its Own Mind at Edel Assanti with Mirtha Dermisache | Noémie Goudal | Sky Hopinka | Anna Hulačová | Marguerite Humeau | Bronwyn Katz | Kat Lyons | Yukultji Napangati | Emmanuel Van der Auwera. An ongoing collective reimagining of our relationship with the living world, rooted in revelations from indigenous knowledge, ecological research, literature, science, and artistic experimentation. Each Place Its Own Mind  borrows its title from ecologist David Abram’s 1996 book The Spell of the Sensuous, which traces the ways the human mind came to renounce its “sensory bearings” in the natural world, visualising a myriad of “lost” faculties that link the “inner, psychological world and the perceptual terrain that surrounds us.”

IN ATTENDANCE – Paying attention in a fragile world competing for attention in the stunning Fitzrovia Chapel includes work by Etel Adnan, Emmanuel Awuni, Phyllida Barlow, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Gabriella Boyd, Miriam Cahn, Eve Sussman, Rachel Kneenbone, Anj Smith, Paula Rego and Cathy Wilkes. Ultimately the gangly body of a foal on the alter arrests the attention here.

Damian Taylor Things Past at Thames-side Studios Gallery. These paintings hover on the edge of discovery where content and surface are ambiguous but reward study with tantalizing recognizable glimpses.

Events

A little out of my depth at the A&G Highlights Meeting at The Geological Society where some talks were quite specialised, involving graphs and terminology beyond my understanding. I do enjoy hearing clever people talk though, even if I can’t grasp exactly what they are explaining. A fascinating presentation by writer Nilanjan Choudhury on ‘The Square Root of a Sonnet’, his play which explores the fraught personal relationship between the brilliant Indian-American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and his mentor, Sir Arthur Eddington of Cambridge University who publicly humiliated him at a Royal Astronomical Society meeting 90 years ago to the day. Guardian Article here

Dr Jessica Irving (Bristol University) gave The Harold Jeffreys Lecture on ‘Hearing planetary hearts: seismology of the cores of Earth and Mars’. An engaging speaker, she led us through the milestones of the last 130 years of theories on what is at the centre of the Earth and the discoveries made using seismology.

Dr Chris Lovell (University of Portsmouth) spoke on his research into ‘Accelerated modelling of the entire observable Universe’. I recognised the dark matter simulations and was fascinated by the different views of a galaxy depending on the band of the light spectrum used to observe it.

I joined a sobering Royal Astronomical Society webinar We Need to Talk About Space Junk presented by Professor Mike Lockwood. Our use of space is increasingly limited and threatened by space junk. The concern is that we are heading towards a runaway effect called the Kessler syndrome, in which the debris from one collision causes many others, to the point where space becomes unusable.

I went to see the fast paced RSC production of Kyoto at Soho Place. Welcome to the Kyoto Conference Centre, 11 December 1997. The nations of the world are in deadlock and 11 hours have passed since the UN’s landmark climate conference should have ended. Time is running out and agreement feels a world away. The greatest obstacle: American oil lobbyist and master strategist, Don Pearlman… Set nearly 20 years ago its depressing how little progress was made and we are currently sliding backwards. Would never have guessed it at the time but now am nostalgic for the politics and positivity of the 90’s.

Time to email your MP to join The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Dark Skies. The group’s primary focus is to preserve the night sky within the UK and promote the adoption of dark sky friendly lighting and planning policies. Surprisingly the committee is made up mostly of tories – come on the rest of you!

Go to this link where it is quick and easy to message your MP to act on this important issue.

Watching Chris Packham’s The Wonder of Animals – Foxes A red fox catches its prey using more than pinpoint hearing and an accurate pounce: it also involves alignment to the slope of Earth’s magnetic fields. I contacted Peter Hore FRS, Professor of Chemistry and Magnetoreception expert at Oxford University who was so helpful to me before in explaining how birds ‘see’ the magnetic field to see if he had come across any new research on this. He has pointed me in the direction of other research conducted by the group looking at fox behaviour so this is something I will pursue further.

Listening to What? Seriously?? with special guest Helen Sharman, the first British astronaut, about how humans learned to survive in space. Quite a few animals were sent to space before humans including two Russian Steppe tortoises (Testudo horsfieldi), who did a circuit of he moon and returned to Earth – alive but starved. The tortoises were chosen as they have a unique ability in the animal world to resist radiation and their blood may be useful in the treatment of radiation sickness. In recent research a string of amino acids have been extracted from the blood of these tortoises and if you inject those amino acids into other animals they become radiation resistant too.

Listening to The Year in Science 2024 podcast – One of the UK’s first military communication satellites’ Skynet 1a launched in 1969 was abandoned a few years later above Africa. Orbital dynamics should have dragged it out somewhere above India but it has been found wandering above the Americas in a busy area of live satellites and no-one knows why. Space consultants think it must have been commanded to move in the 1970’s but can find no record of this and although research has been undertaken it is still a mystery how this satellite moved. BBC article

There is no mention of a cosmic ray interaction forcing the command, but that would be my theory!

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context

January 4, 2025 //
0

To welcome back the light of longer days I collected one of my solargraph cans from The Hogsmill Nature Reserve where it had been fixed to a hide for 6 months, since the summer solstice, looking out across the water where the birds gather. Really pleased with the image and that it captured the reflection too.

So delighted that Cosmic Chiasmus: crossing the universe was included in the amazing Serendipity Arts Festival, an annual interdisciplinary festival held across multiple venues in Panjim, Goa, India. I just wish I could have visited 💎🌌✨️☀️

My video was shown as part of the selected module exhibition CARBON, curated by the Science Gallery Bengaluru team in collaboration with artist and curator Ravi Agarwal.

Artists: Annelie Berner; Susan Eyre; Marina Zurkow; David Hochagatterer; Dhiraj Kumar Nite; Jan Sweirowski; Jane Tingley; Maria Joseph and Nuvedo; Shanthamani Muddaiah

Curated walkthrough with Jahnavi Phalkey

The video (05:29 min) offers a glimpse into a subatomic world where cosmic rays travel from distant galaxies to collide and silently interact with atoms and technology on Earth. Above our heads where cosmic rays interact with the Earth’s atmosphere radioactive carbon-14 is formed. This is then absorbed by plants that are eaten by animals and humans. When an organism dies, no more carbon-14 will be absorbed and the current amount in the organism will start to decay. By measuring the remaining carbon-14 in organic matter, the time of death can be established. Cosmic ray activity gives us carbon dating techniques.

I attended The John Brown Memorial Lecture: Exploring Cosmological Phenomena: An Artist’s Perspective, talk by Ione Parkin RWA at The Royal Astronomical Society. Ione is the Co-Founder/Lead Artist of the Creativity and Curiosity Art-Astronomy Project (C&C). She is an Honorary Visiting Fellow of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester and a member of the British Association of Planetaria. Through her many cosmological paintings the ephemeral, gaseous, nebulous phenomena of space are given an earthly materiality that still retains the sense of the intangible. Ione has created an impressive body of work. I especially liked the cloud chamber mixed media pieces and photopolymer etchings created through the fluorescence microscopy process of firing laser beams of light of one wavelength at the surface of the painting then capturing the light emitted from a longer wavelength. Look forward to seeing these works irl rather than digital images.

I am over the moon that Ione has selected my sculpture The Azimuth Obelisk (of sedimentary knowledge) to be included in Cosmos: The Art of Observing Space, a major exhibition she is curating at the Royal West of England Academy in 2026. Cosmos will bring together a body of artwork inspired by themes of astronomy, cosmology, astrophysics, planetary atmospherics, space-exploration, solar dynamics and celestial mechanics. There will be a catalogue published to accompany the exhibition with a Foreword by Professor Chris Lintott (Professor of Astrophysics, University of Oxford).

In the studio I have been conducting some more tests towards a video installation which will respond to the crystal structure of magnetite and a quote from Jason Groves book The Geological Unconscious – ‘What truth could be more unexpected ….than the one in which the mineral envisions while also being envisioned.’

Magnetite is attracted to a magnet and can be magnetized to become a permanent magnet itself. It’s crystal structure was determined in 1915 as one of the first crystal structures to be obtained using X-ray diffraction. Magnetite contains both ferrous (divalent) and ferric (trivalent) iron. At present I am just testing the concept and technical issues using a small board with some lenses inserted in a circle pattern. The large lenses used to distort the projection represent the oxygen present in the crystal structure, I have drilled some smaller holes to test lenses to represent the iron component. In my tests I was surprised to find that when the small lenses were inserted in the holes the projection image was no longer visible on the wall. The small lenses I have are quite thick, but still it was unexpected. I am sourcing some thin lenses to test.

Projection with no lenses in board – no distortion of image

With all lenses inserted – large lens distortion occurs but small lens images not visible

Tests with only large lenses inserted for distortion

Tests using back projection screen and looking directly at the lenses

Exhibitions visited

In the Thick of Things at APT curated by Chris Marshall and Cash Aspeek including works by Laura White, Asaki Kan, Leila Galloway and Deborah Gardner. Big messy works, tumbling, sliding and colliding following the vein of arte povera letting the materials speak. Had a touching conversation about the last days of our respective parents with Cash who had made a very personal series of work using her parents marital bed of 60 years as both subject and material.

Conglomerates at Hypha Gallery Mayfair, a group show featuring work by Paola Bascon, Rhiannon Hunter, Rona Lee, Hannah Morgan, Davinia-Ann Robinson and Sam Williams. A warm and earthy show exploring care formed through relations with self and other beings to create substrates for resistance, deep-knowing, storying and kinning as processes of paying attention to that which is unheard.

Reading

While reading Margaret Atwood’s disturbing novel Oryx and Crake (to gain insight after seeing the stunning collaboration between Wayne McGregor and Max Richter in Maddaddam at ROH recently) I came across a reference to Mesembryanthemaceae – a plant which disguises itself as small pebbles by taking on patterns and colouring of the ground it grows on. I had forgotten about these strange plants commonly called stone lithops or living stones. The thick leaves can store enough water for the plants to survive for months without rain and during dry periods they shrivel into the ground. With no stem they are partially subterranean, sending light down to the buried leaf cells via ingenious reflecting ‘window cells’ on the two wide leaf tips.

In The Human Soul: Its Movements, Its Lights, and the Iconography of the Fluidic Invisible, originally published in French in 1896, Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc (1850–1909) postulates the existence of “the fluidic invisible” — a “vital cosmic force”, which he calls Odic liquid, that extends across the universe and “saturates the organism of living beings and constitutes our fluidic body”. Instead of all things being composed of one elementary substance, as in philosophical accounts of the monad, in this cosmic vision, we all live in a sea that we cannot see, which Baraduc names Somod.

This remarkable image posted by Public Domain Review is one of the many attempts to capture the “vital cosmic force” made by Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc a French physician and parapsychologist who believed he could photograph thoughts and emotions.⁠

“Pure electography of the hand by Iodko’s method. The hand of an over-electrified person, placed on a plate gives a very remarkable impression of the electrified cutaneous surface.”

I am intrigued as to what might ‘over-electrified person’ mean? I was also fascinated by this image – “Luminous spectre of the north pole magnet, obtained by the red electric photographic lamp, surrounded by fine pearls of psychecstasis.”

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abstractions

October 5, 2024 //
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The ‘Art, Science and Creativity’ exhibition at Liverpool’s spectacular Central Library continues. The exhibition is inspired by statements from Albert Einstein, highlighting the fact that creativity is central to explorations in both art and science. As we wonder, and attempt to understand the universe and ourselves, categories can, and perhaps should, become blurred. Distinctions can be both valuable and problematic: ‘art’ versus ‘science’, ‘nature’ versus ‘human’, ‘natural’ versus ‘supernatural’, ‘material’ versus ‘spiritual’, ‘secular’ versus ‘religious’ and so on. And as the great science-fiction writer Arthur C Clarke said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

I am very happy to have two unique books included in the exhibition. In/Out and Unbound.

Liverpool Book Art and Fevered Imagination are collaborating to create a video loop of all the artworks, enabling audiences to get a fuller appreciation of the artists’ creativity than allowed by the use only of display cases. Fevered Imagination is a website dedicated to Artists Books, through which works from the exhibition can be bought.

I am delighted to be invited by Serendipity Arts Foundation to show Cosmic Chiasmus: crossing the universe at Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa later this year.

Serendipity Arts Foundation is an organisation that facilitates pluralistic cultural expressions, sparking conversations around the arts across the South Asian region. Committed to innovation and creativity, the aim of the Foundation is to support practice and research in the arts, as well as to promote sustainability and education in the field through a range of cultural and collaborative initiatives. The Foundation hosts projects throughout the year, which include institutional partnerships with artists and arts organisations, educational initiatives, grants, and outreach programs across India.

Serendipity Arts Festival is one of the largest multi-disciplinary arts initiatives in the South Asian region. It spans the visual, performing, and culinary arts, whilst exploring genres with film, live arts, and literature. Besides the core content, which is conceptualised by an eminent curatorial panel, the Festival has various layers of programming, in the form of educational initiatives, workshops, special projects, and institutional engagements. Through active conversations between the artistic community and the urban, social landscape, the Festival continues to evolve around the mandate of making the arts visible and accessible. The Festival is driven by a spirit of collaboration, hoping to inspire new perspectives and fresh aesthetic encounters. This labour of love is a cultural experiment that also addresses issues such as arts education, patronage culture, interdisciplinary discourse, inclusivity, and accessibility in the arts.

Other exciting news is that Julie F. Hill and myself are working together again on a new project. Following on from our ambitious duo show A Stone Sky at Thames-side Studios Gallery (Nov 23), we will be curating and participating in an exhibition next spring, exploring themes of stone consciousness and human-mineral encounters.

In the studio I have been working on a proposal for the Moon Gallery. Moon Gallery is an international collaborative artwork and a gallery of ideas which aims to set up the first permanent museum on the Moon. Moon Gallery will launch 100 artefacts to the Moon within the compact format of a 10 x 10 x 1cm plate on a lunar lander exterior panelling as early as 2025.

Each sculpture has to fit within a 1cm cube, which is quite challenging. My proposal is a 5mm spherical magnet sparkling with black volcanic sand on a 1cm square of patinated copper. Space exploration means leaving the protective shield of Earth’s magnetic field, placing astronauts and technology at risk from increased levels of harmful high energy particles. This artwork is a small realization of a magnetic field offered as a symbol of safe passage to those venturing beyond our home planet and protection of Earth’s magnetosphere. The black volcanic sand used in this work is naturally magnetic, making visible the force that emanates from the core of the magnet. The patination colour reflects on the astonishing view of our blue planet from the moon and the importance of water to sustain life. The title Core Values, makes reference to the molten core necessary for a planet to generate a magnetic field as well as the ethical principles and beliefs that guide humanity in a positive spirit of peaceful cooperation for the benefit of all. The work operates as a motif for what is in the heart of a body, rocky or otherwise. It also celebrates the beauty of the elements and natural forces that together inspire the human imagination and makes the cosmos so exciting to explore.

I have been sorting out the copper contours from The Absolute Hut (of action potential) as I couldn’t store this work, it had to be dismantled. The copper will be reused in future work.

I am making a new concrete tablet for Instruments of the Anemoi series with more detailed compass rose inspired copper insets. The copper is guillotined to shape and screen printed with a sugarlift solution.

The pieces are then dipped in bitumen and left to dry before putting in a bath of warm water to dissolve the sugar solution, leaving the design ready to be etched.

I also cut some copper shapes to patinate, painting the copper with salt and vinegar and soy sauce before fuming in an ammonia bath. I love how the colours change throughout the process.

I was going to patinate the dodecagon shapes as well but in the test I did, I lost a lot of detail, so these will just be inked and left.

Gallery Visits

Charmaine Watkiss showing her beautiful drawings full of symbolism in Hard Graft at Wellcome Collection. The exhibition explores the impact of work on health and her works celebrate the ancestral herbal knowledge of medicinal and edible plants and fruits that carry powerful healing properties.

These were used to secretly cure illnesses and prevent diseases as an act of survival and self-dependency, distinct from Western medicine. The connection between herbal healing and African spiritual practices is represented by cosmological symbols discreetly tattooed on the women’s bodies. Natural dyes – such as Jamaica’s Blue Mountain coffee and indigo – and materials such as brass and raffia palm embed historical knowledge in the fabric of the works. This knowledge is preserved, yet concealed, by the figures who avoid the viewer’s gaze.

The London Group Stillness in Movement at Bermondsey Project Space. Taking three evocative lines from Four Quartets by T S Eliot as a starting point for this group show. Images – Carol Wyss, Sandra Crisp, Genetic Moo and Beverley Duckworth.

‘Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea’


Rona Lee Lithic Entanglements at Sedgewick Museum of Earth Sciences. A considered intervention in the Whewell Mineral Gallery to ‘bring the dirt back in’, making evident the scarred landscapes, physical extraction processes as well as the social strata of those involved in procuring such a collection. There is no denying the allure of minerals and gemstones and the work here captures the beauty of the rocks while also reminding us of the ravaged Earth left scarred and depleted.

‘A Modern Lapidary a video work, back projected through one of the free-standing cases, animates mid-century scientific photographs of minerals, altering our perception of the samples within as ‘dead’ matter. Elsewhere, in An Extractive Index, digitally collaged photographs of geological field trips are laminated on to the glass, inviting reflection on the social and environmental relationships which these reveal.’ 

The Museum itself was also fascinating to look round and after Rona’s artist talk we were treated to tea in the The John Watson Building Stones Gallery which houses the most complete collection of stones used in construction.

Emma Stibbon Melting Ice | Rising Tides at Towner Eastbourne. A day trip to the see this remarkable body of work so thoughtfully curated. The pale majesty of ice or chalk cliff faces, fragile against pounding seas that Emma witnesses in both the polar and local Sussex coastlines are captured so poignantly. These are portraits of great bodies under stress. Close up, edges and lines break down into fluid, watery strokes, a diaphanous translation of the fast painterly sketches made in often gruelling conditions. Wonderfully immersive, through scale and placement, and the understated palette of deep muted greens and blues, almost blacks and luminous whites which draw the viewer into the landscapes.

Listening

 Sideways – A New Frontier. A four-part podcast about the ethics of space exploration with former NASA astronaut Nicole Stott, new astronaut Ed Dwight, Space Philosopher and author Frank White, Anthropologist of Space and Religion, Deana Weibel, Professor of Religion at Knox College Robert Geraci and former ISRO scientist, Jijith Nadumari Ravi.

Astronauts and space tourists often cite the overview effect as a transformative experience offering the perspective to see a shared planet with no borders. Some however, experience the ‘ultraview’ effect which is the overwhelming and disorienting knowledge of the magnitude of the universe.

BBC Inside Science Podcast. How much of a risk is space junk? As we send more and more metal in the form of satellites up into space, scientists are warning it is becoming more of a risk both here – and up there.

Much space junk comes from defunct satellites. There are plans to launch 60,000 more satellites by 2030. It is estimated there is currently 12, 400 tons of space junk orbiting Earth – 2,500 discarded satellites and 130 million fragments that travel at 10 times the speed of a bullet. Because of the orbiting junk, Space X satellites must make around 275 collision avoidance manoeuvres every day. It is not only dangerous in space but large debris is falling to Earth and not burning up in the atmosphere. It is predicted life will be lost in the next decade as a result of falling space junk, there have already been some near misses. The satellites and launch debris that does burn up in the atmosphere releases large amounts of metal into the atmosphere with unknown consequences.

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