Archives for posts with tag: Rupert Sheldrake

Secrets

October 6, 2026 //

Honoured to be invited to contribute a postcard for the RWA secret auction which offers the unique chance to purchase original, large postcard-sized works of art by leading figures from the art world. The exhibition Cosmos: the art of observing space which ran at the RWA earlier this year will soon be traveling to Aberdeen Art Gallery. My works Azimuth Obelisk (of sedimentary knowledge), 92 Years Measured in Light and Sun Factor will join the tour.

I have created a digital iteration of the Book of Reversals. Using the scanned images made during my HiResidency at Equivalentbehaviour and a recorded dialogue of the text over the gentle sounds of the sea. The Book of Reversals offers a poetic overview of the formation of planet Earth and its turbulent fluid core that generates an unpredictable but protective magnetic field prone to sudden changes in polarity. Graph readings from magnetometers stationed around the British Isles, which record variations in the Earth’s magnetic field, are screen printed in vertical stripes, either side of the book’s spine, emulating the geological phenomena of magnetic stripes found on the ocean floor. These symmetrical bands, found at mid-ocean ridges, are created as magma rises, cools, and forms new oceanic crust whose magnetic minerals align with Earth’s prevailing magnetic field.

The narrative reflects on the complex dynamics of Earth’s history of polarity reversals, periods of weakened magnetic field, ceaseless interactions between the inner core, the outer core, the mantle and the crust and how its secrets may be discovered.

I am pursuing ideas put forward in my longlisted Artangel proposal to commemorate the pioneering cosmic ray science that took place at during the Haverah Park experiment. This was once home to one of the largest extensive cosmic ray air shower arrays in the world, studying the highest-energy cosmic-rays, until it closed in the late 1980’s. My proposal stated that any sculpture or intervention made where the remains of the huts stand, should take current land use into account.

Having visited the detector huts abandoned across the North Yorkshire moors and seen that sheep are kept on the land here, I have been thinking about how the sheep might experience the night sky.

I had an idea to create a star gazing platform for the sheep, however from just a small amount of research I discovered that there is a fatal illness in sheep which farmers refer to as ‘stargazing’ due to the unnatural position of the sheep’s head looking up. Also, sheep have evolved eyes where the pupil automatically remains horizontal to the ground so that they can spot predators approaching even when they are feeding with their heads down. It seems they might not look skywards unless they are afflicted by a terrible brain disease. Despite this unfortunate discovery, it has been interesting to discover how sheep interact with the world.

Although popular culture often portrays sheep as unintelligent, scientific evidence shows they can form complex social relationships within their flocks and have an extremely good learning ability and memory. Their vision is quite different from ours as they have monocular vision with horizontal, rectangular pupils, giving an impressive panoramic visual field. However with blind spots front and rear, and poor depth perception they can be easily spooked. Although they can see well in low light they are unable to gain sharp focus on distant objects, so even under the dark skies of the moors they might not see the stars clearly if they could look up.

Their vision might be compromised in some instances but it is possible sheep may be sensitive to Earth’s magnetic field. Research has shown that on days when the weather is not so likely to influence how they align their bodies, they appear to show a preferred north-east–south-west alignment which could mean they use magnetoreception for orientation. Similar tendencies have also been observed in cattle, deer, and other mammals.

For work connected to this project I have been doing some preliminary experiments with thread and cardboard boxes. I made some small cardboard models in the shape of the huts but have moved on to thinking of representing the water tanks which were used to record the shower particles as they arrive in a thin disc like structure, sweeping through the atmosphere at nearly the velocity of light. My current thinking is that a series of ‘tanks’ will be wall based with thread woven across the inside marking out the shapes of constellations, potential origins of cosmic rays. The inside of the ‘tanks’ will be lined with rich blue cyanotypes – images made with starlight (the sun). The blue echoes the colour of the scintillating light of Cherenkov radiation which emits photons with short wavelengths and high frequencies, which the human eye sees as blue and violet.

Other ideas in progress include a reinterpretation of the Cosmati Pavement of Westminster Abbey. The mosaic is full of medieval symbolism and sacred geometry and number systems. I am looking to relate ancient symbolism and contemporary iconography to think about changing relationships to fire, water, earth, air and the cosmos. Plato imagined the universe was created as a living creature in the shape of a sphere, perfect and complete in itself. Patterns of Thought author Richard Foster suggests that ‘as our minds become progressively tuned to ecological and global concerns, so the Platonic image of the world as a living creature is re-awakened from its sleep.’

Galleries and other visits

Really enjoyed Annabel Elgar Birds Fly Low at HAPAX Living Room. A speculative reconstruction of a secretive life stemming from finding a pamphlet of instructions for making a spy balloon tucked inside a box of sewing items bought at an online auction. Photographs, keepsakes and other items in the box including a prescription for Thorazine, first administered in the 1950s to treat anxiety, psychosis and agoraphobia, provide intriguing but evasive clues to the owner known only as K.V.M. Faded receipts from a store in Cromarty, Scotland led Annabel to an airfield at Evanton, a launch site for Project Genetrix, a 1950s US programme gathering Cold War intelligence. Surveillance balloons, disguised as weather devices, flew over China, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, with over one hundred launched from Evanton in 1956. The installation at HAPAX includes atmospheric analogue photographs of the items alongside historic photos from the cold war era of the tangled and smashed remains of the ‘spy’ balloons found by the Russians. The pamphlet is sealed away into a frame, not disclosing any of its secrets to the viewer.

A trip to Jena (J in the alphabet odyssey).

“You are simply heavenly/paradisiacal” is a declaration of love to the city of Jena, playing on the name of the nearby popular park called “Paradies” (Paradise). The name stretches back to the Middle Ages. The area along the eastern bank of the Saale River was home to a monastery orchard and lush, idyllic water meadows. Because of its beautiful, fertile green landscape, the locals began referring to this specific stretch of land as “Das Paradies” (The Paradise).

Often called the “City of Light,” Jena in Germany is the home of the world’s oldest operating planetarium and the legacy of optical pioneer Carl Zeiss. Disappointingly, The German Optical Museum (DOM) which holds optical instruments from eight centuries in its globally unique collections, is closed for refurbishment until 2028. The Planetarium, however, has recently reopened after refurbishment, in time to celebrate its centenary. Due to the many train delays in Germany (I was surprised to find the service is constantly delayed) we missed the English version of the planetarium show which is presented just once a week, so ended up seeing the rock and pop space tour which takes you from our solar system to our galaxy, onwards to the wider universe and zooms back in again to find our tiny dot amidst the infinite vastness. The building is very beautiful.

Visited The Goethe Laboratory which is in the former chambers of Jena Botanical Garden’s inspector’s house. It is dedicated to Goethe’s work as a natural scientist, his interests in botany, geology, colour theory and morphology. Between 1775 and 1830 Goethe visited Jena many times, actively involved with the University, establishing museums and collections and working on his experiments in colour theory. Goethe collected and was fascinated by fossils, noticing similarities in the development of bones across species. Through his careful analysis, he succeeded in the (re)discovery of the intermaxillary bone in humans. He had a passion for the deep time of geology and collected lava rocks from Vesuvius and Etna, rock crystals from the Alps, along with limestone and many others.

»It is a pleasant task to explore nature and oneself at the same time, to do violence neither to her nor to one’s own spirit, but to bring both into balance with one another through a gentle reciprocal influence.« – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Proverbs in Prose 1.369

Also visited Schiller’s Garden House where the poet Friedrich Schiller lived and wrote in the late18th Century. He was a good friend of Goethe and the garden features an original stone table where, whenever Goethe was in town, they sat here chatting almost every day. Following Schiller’s death, the estate was purchased by the state and Duke Carl August, the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, had an observatory built on the site. Optical engineer, lecturer and physicist, Ernst Abbe became director of this observatory while living in Schiller’s former garden house. A meridian stone was erected in the grounds to serve as a southern marker for telescope alignment and precise time determination.

Together with Otto Schott and Carl Zeiss, Ernst Abbe developed numerous optical instruments. He came up with the mathematical foundation of microscope design and formulated the limit of optical resolution in an imaging device due to diffraction, nowadays also known as the “Abbe limit”.

There was a beautiful and fascinating exhibition Electrum mundi – Amber worlds at The Jena Phyletic Museum, a globally unique institution founded by Ernst Haeckel, dedicated to the history of evolution and the development of life on Earth. There are more than 200 amber deposits worldwide, it is found on all continents except Antarctica. Amber has always been intriguing for its unusual properties. The Greeks named it ḗlektron for its power to attract other materials. Desired as jewellery for its translucence and rare inclusions that hold lifeforms eternally preserved, pure amber is known as Solar Stone for its golden colour and is very valuable.

The presentation of the tiny amber pieces next to a blown up digital image revealing what is held at this scale in these miniature cosmos was very effective. There are three categorizations of tree resin depending on its age which can be determined by carbon dating, chemical analysis and also by any identifiable inclusions. Amber is fully fossilized and hundreds of millions years old, copal is sub-fossilized and a few hundred thousand years old, defaunation resin defines copal from 1760, the beginning of industrialization. The oldest amber found so far was in Illinois and dated to be 320 million years old. The oldest amber with inclusions, a mosquito and two mites, was dated at 230 million years old, a time when all land masses were merged into the giant continent Pangea. Baltic amber has been used in Europe since at least the neolithic period, travelling the amber road into Egypt and Asia.

Thirty-six pieces of unpolished amber were located in Goethe’s mineral collection and have been non-invasively examined with micro-CT scanning. The insects in the inclusions were able to be identified and transformed into 3D computer models.

The demand for amber has put it at the centre of aggressive trade practices, illegal mining and the manufacture of fake inclusions. During the Middle Ages, the rich amber-producing Baltic coastline became known as the amber shelf was was controlled by the Teutonic Knights and turned into a strict state monopoly. At this time, amber was not just decorative but also used as a source of light, being burnt instead of beeswax, it was sought after as a guard against disease and used by the wealthy as gambling tokens. The state legacy of control continued until 1945.

Illegal amber mining is currently causing major environmental damage particularly in Ukraine and Russia, along with social problems caused by violent gang warfare and lack of policing exacerbated by the war. Extraction methods involve pumping water into the land, hoping the amber will float to the surface to be skimmed of, this flooding leaves huge areas of land devasted and unusable.

At a stop in Cologne on the way to Jena, I came across The Friends Rendezvous (Au rendez-vous des amis) painting by Max Ernst, 1922 at the Museum Ludwig. Having recently experienced the 2026 total eclipse of the sun in Greenland, surrounded by icebergs, the painting struck a chord with the background depicting a total eclipse and what looked like icebergs (though these turned out to be representations of the Alps). Ernst’s use of an eclipse in his painting is to signify a portent for change at the advent of the surrealist movement.

Ernst may well have been influenced by recent total solar eclipses that took on great significance as the observations obtained during these eclipses were able to confirm Einstein’s theory of general relativity, that gravity can bend space-time. In 1919 two expeditions set forth to make observations from Brazil, and an island off the west coast of Africa. Astronomer Royal Frank Dyson suffered equipment failure in Brazil but Arthur Eddington, was able to photograph the event giving results consistent with gravitational lensing. In 1922 it was possible to confirm these results when a total solar eclipse travelled the full width of Australia offering a full five minutes of totality and drawing astronomers from the United States, Canada, New Zealand, India and Britain to journey to a remote setting to make their observations.

Also at the Museum Ludwig I found Palianytsia (white bread) 2022 by Zhanna Kadyrova very moving. She collects stones from the rivers of the Carpathian Mountains which resemble Ukranian loaves when sliced. Wheat shapes the landscape and economy of Ukraine. The exhibition text refers to the requisition of wheat by Bolsheviks in the 1930’s which left 4 million people to starve. The work was made the same year as the Russians invaded Ukraine causing a severe drop in wheat production and triggering major disruptions in global grain markets.

Having been looking at various methods of string art I was impressed by Günther Uecker’s nail reliefs from 1968, although no string or thread is involved.

A very entertaining talk at Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden, from Mary Branson on her past exploits, including her extraordinary work New Dawn installed in the Houses of Parliament, which celebrates the centenary of the Suffrage movement. There was also the opportunity to view her very touching and personal ‘A Conversation with My Mother’ installed here for the summer season. Inspired by a vibrant dream of having a conversation with her mother while in a boat at a time when her mother was suffering from dementia and was no longer able to speak. The boat, made from hand steamed and bent wooden pallets is lined with copper leaf giving it an unearthly inner glow. The boat is viewed from a bench set between speakers where you hear the garden appropriate poem, ‘Insects’ by John Clare, recited. From one side you hear the voice of Mary, and from the other, the voice of her mother recorded at a time just before the onset of her illness. The recital descends into static, which Mary says describes the loss of communication between them but I thought might represent the electromagnetic spectrum that could be a way of communicating across dimensions.

I love the work by Charly Blackburn showing in Lanthanides: Rare Earth Spectra, a presentation of works developed during her year-long residency at County Hall Pottery. I was lucky to be able to buy a small piece. Her funded research project, Developing Rare Earth Elements in Ceramic Glazing, investigates the use of rare earth elements within ceramics, exploring their magical, luminescent and light-reactive qualities alongside their wider social and technological significance.

Born from supernova explosions, pulled from the ground and purified at processing plants, Lanthanides are found in lenses, computer screens, lighting, fibre optics, corrective eye-surgery lasers, and MRI scanners. They illuminate streets, sharpen our glasses and peer into our bodies. This exhibition materialises these overlooked elements, revealing the otherwise silent conductors of our tech-laden lifestyles. Erbium pink. Praseodymium green. They are named as ‘critical’ and ’strategic’ but collectively, we barely know their elemental names.

These pieces are very alluring, Charly acknowledges that their crystalline beauty can distract from the more serious implications of the extraction, processing and technological reliance or rare earth minerals that she wishes to highlight. We settled on ‘painfully beautiful’ as an apt description.

From The Land at Proposition Studios, Bethnal Green brings together works that examine the relationship between architecture and the living world. Works included Aeolian (sand welding experiments) Aeolian explores wind as an active architectural agent shaping form, motion and environmental transformation. Central to the research was the study of ‘fulgurites’, glass formations created when lightening strikes sand at extreme temperatures. Blade Building a collaborative timber construction. Earthly Planets, a variety of soil samples fashioned into spheres using the Japanese technique of Doro Dango. A series of rich composite images exploring the rise of the technosphere, generated from blending remote sensing, mapping and environmental data to render visible otherwise unseen infrastructures and processes shaping the earth system.

Jaspar Marsalis Still Life at Chisenhale Gallery. Bringing attention to parts of life that no-one can own. Viewing a large cinematic projection is from a steep slope of scaffolding to give the idea of stadium viewing with a safety warning not to touch the electrostatic speakers which are programmed to emit static tones created from the transmission frequencies of the imagery. The random footage of obscure landscapes is hacked from unsecured surveillance cameras that capture and send footage over an IP network rather than through traditional cables. Obsolete forms of surveillance hardware left behind yet still, almost poignantly, performing their original function. Attention is held by a curiosity as to what might appear next, might some extraordinary event be captured and shared.

Gail Dickerson, Beaconsfield EarthAIR 2026, Environmental Artist In Residence exhibition showing research and works in progress and new works made with London Clay and Lambeth Group Sediments. Gail works closely with London Geodiversity Partnership and Museum of London in her exploration of local geologies and London Clay. An incredible amount of work with detailed cataloguing of the soil to reveal the changes at different depths and some great painterly collaborations with the earth.

A visit to Goodwood Art Foundation Sculpture Park to see the fabulous Nancy Holt exhibition MoonSunStarEarthSkyWater. The last time I visited the park was in 2008 when it was the Cass Sculpture Park. A lot has changed. It only reopened 14 months ago and it is still shiny and new. Nancy Holt’s work, as curator Ann Gallagher points out, is all about perceiving. Some of the works in the gallery were made after her visit to the UK in 1969 where she was fascinated by ancient neolithic sites but also the bright orange markings of hiking trails in the lake district.

Nancy Holt’s Hydra’s Head (1974) earthwork, formed of six pools of water positioned according to the Hydra constellation, has its first posthumous installation within the Foundation’s chalk quarry, where the pools reflect the changing skies above.

Also some great pieces by Eva Rothschild.

Rachel Whiteread’s solidification of space looking good set against a living, breathing woodland setting.

A vast magic cube throwing colours about by Hélio Oiticica, Susan Philipsz beautifully layered soundscape that draws you further into the woods and strong pairing of steel and stone by Lee Ufan.

Saw a fantastic production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard at the Duke of York’s Theatre, which explores the relationship between past and present, order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty. It slices across time to reveal perspectives on nature, fashions in stylised landscape with carefully placed ruins and even a real hermit installed. The search for truth, authenticity and academic renown is ripped apart. Acerbically funny and very clever.

Some passages from my 2014 MA dissertation Finding Paradise –

In his book Forests; the Shadow of Civilization Robert Pogue Harrison brings to our attention the rich history of our relationship with the forest as our first refuge and birthplace of civilization. From the legends and poetry of the past we are saturated in the belief that our origins are in the woods. He quotes from Virgil’s Aeneid

“These woodland places
Once were homes of local fauns and nymphs
Together with a race of men that came
From tree trunks, from hard oak”

Since these ancient beginnings when we first carved out a space in the forest we have always looked back to a time when we believed we lived in harmony with nature. Our shared beliefs took root in Greek mythology where poets told of a Golden Age of men living blissfully on the bounty of the land, a world of innocent sanctity lost to us amid the power struggles of the Titans. Virgil took up the theme of a lost haven of delight locating it in an idealized Arcady transposing pastoral imagery from the lush valleys and meadows of Sicily onto the wild and rocky Greek countryside. The fantasy of Arcadia was born which has inspired the artists and poets we have revered ever since.

The framing of a new perspective where landscape becomes picture was fuelled by sciences whose methodology required exactitude. Through measuring our world we hoped to gain control. First the poetic wisdom of the sage was abandoned, then the erudite scholar was replaced by the incisive research man extolling the objectification of nature. Nature that could be experienced vicariously through painting denied the viewer a visceral encounter and heralded the sublimation of desire for direct contact. The mythologizing of the rural began even before Virgil’s ‘Bucolics’ and continues today “massaged by technological spectacle” in mass entertainments such as ‘Avatar’.

Reading

I have returned to reading The Physics of Angels and am intrigued by Rupert Sheldrake’s theories on the potential consciousness of the sun. Having spent quite a lot of time looking at the sun (through a filter) and watching it being totally eclipsed, I quite like the idea that it is conscious in some incomprehensible way, which would mean all the other stars are as well. A universe filled with cosmic bodies crackling and glimmering with electrical impulses of such complexity that what the sun is experiencing is totally outside what we can understand yet maybe we can acknowledge in some way.

‘If there’s a connection between our consciousness and complex, dynamic electromagnetic patterns in our brains, there’s no reason that I can see for denying the possibility of this connection in other cases and especially on the sun.‘

Tags amber, Annabel Elgar, Arcadia, Charly Blackburn, Cherenkov radiation, Cosmati pavement, Cosmos: the art of observing space, Equivalentbehaviour, Ernst Abbe, Eva Rothschild, Gail Dickerson, Günther Uecker, Goethe, Goodwood Art Foundation, Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden, HAPAX Living Room, Haverah Park, Jena, Large Hadron Collider, magnetic field reversal, Mary Branson, Max Ernst, Museum Ludwig, Nancy Holt, Phyletic Museum, Planetarium, Rachel Whiteread, Rupert Sheldrake, RWA secret auction, Schiller, sheep, Susan Philipsz, The Book of Reversals, total eclipse, total solar eclipse, Zeiss, Zhanna Kadyrova

Categories Uncategorized

Occupied

June 13, 2026 //

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

Installation images of my work by Emma Brown Photography

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

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

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

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

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

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

My proposal is to scan the Book of Reversals to make a digital work with narration. The physical work will be exhibited at Brompton Cemetery Chapel in the upcoming Appearances are a Glimpse of the Unseen. This book is a poetic interpretation of the formation of planet Earth and its turbulent internal fluid core that generates an unpredictable but protective magnetic field prone to sudden changes in polarity. Ocean floor magnetic stripes are a geological phenomenon consisting of alternating bands of differing magnetic polarity. Our planet is a complex and dynamic body where interactions occur ceaselessly between the inner core the outer core the mantle and the crust.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out of studio activities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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