Archives for posts with tag: Sandra Crisp

Occupied

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

Installation images of my work by Emma Brown Photography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out of studio activities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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polarity

December 6, 2025 //
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I am enjoying discovering the gutter creatures who share my home. Gathering video footage of an alternative cosmos to go towards making work which will be shown in Occupied: Strange Company at the Safehouse next year, a group exhibition curated by Julie Hoyle.

My experiments growing citric acid crystals have been going well. I am filming these transformations under polarised light which reveals the many vibrant colours but I also like the images without the filter. The structures remind me of feathers so I am thinking about creatures that flutter as well as those that swim.

Time in the studio has been spent checking over and preparing works that will be showing in Cosmos: The Art of Observing Space curated by Ione Parkin which opens in the new year. I am thrilled to be part of this exhibition bringing together contemporary and historic artists and featuring an extraordinary range of work inspired by the cosmos. I have completed a test build of The Azimuth Obelisk (of sedimentary knowledge) using a new internal structure for before packing it all away again ready for transport to The Royal West of England Academy in Bristol. This work is a reimagining of an permanent azimuth mark erected at Hartland Magnetic Observatory in North Devon from which the drift of the magnetic north pole is monitored. Made of many layers hand torn from recycled works on paper it echoes the geological and magnetic history of the Earth which is secreted in the strata of sedimentary rock. The protruding tabs of paper seen in these studio images are markers for each section of paper squares of a tapering size and will get tucked away at installation in the gallery. With the added thickness of my new studio roof insulation the obelisk only just fits in now.

I have started work on inserting copper segments into the new sculpture for the Instruments of the Anemoi series. The other larger pieces of etched and patinated copper were added at the time of casting, held in place with tape and hope when the concrete was poured into the mould. This series of sculptures are suggestive of the pedestals that support various instruments used in monitoring the Earths’ magnetic field but are envisaged here as speculative objects used by the wind gods as the first emissaries of navigation.

I am still battling with writing text for The Book of Reversals, an artist book that responds to the record of Earth’s magnetic field reversals being written in bands of minerals on the ocean floor.

The crisp crust fractures / Fragments slide across a viscous veneer

Submarine mountains tower / Ocean trenches gape

Tectonic plates subduct / melting into the mantle 

Deep time traces are consumed / surfaces ceaselessly reformed

The Earth’s magnetic field has been a fascinating mystery for many hundreds of years and Gillian Turner’s book North Pole, South Pole recounts the stories of those who sought to solve its origin and mechanism. Something I hope to look at in more depth is how pottery and bricks preserve the direction of the magnetic field in their minerals during the process of firing which heats and then cools the clay – the same process that occurs in a lava flow. Iron-bearing minerals (like magnetite) in clay become “magnetic” when heated in a kiln. As the pottery cools, these minerals lock into the Earth’s magnetic field direction and strength at that time. The study of the magnetic properties of ancient pottery, known as archaeomagnetism, has been used to make records of the inclination of the magnetic field from past millennia. Inspired by these studies of manmade artefacts to determine the historical position of the north magnetic pole, physicists Bernard Brunhes and Pierre David took samples from exposed lava flows and their underlying clay in central France. In 1906 they came to the astonishing conclusion that about six million years ago the magnetic field seemed to point in the opposite direction, the first indication of magnetic field reversals.

Also with thanks to Gillian Turner’s book North Pole, South Pole I have learnt that there were early hydrogen balloon ascents to determine if the Earth’s magnetic field intensity varied with altitude, helping to decide if the magnetic field came from within the Earth or was extra terrestrial. In 1804 Jean-Baptiste Biot and Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac made a pioneering ascent to 4,000 feet (1.2km). In Turner’s book she writes that the dip needle necessary to take the measurements iced up and so the results were unreliable. I feel for them, but it seems they conducted many other experiments on temperature and gases in the atmosphere while aloft and in any case we now know they would have needed to ascend many kilometres higher than they achieved to notice any weakening in the magnetic field.

This plate is from John Howard Appleton’s (1844-1930) Chemistry, Developed by Facts and Principles Drawn Chiefly from the Non-Metals, published in 1884.

I am trying to remember when I first had the idea to launch a cloud chamber in the payload of a high altitude balloon. I knew about the hot-air balloon experiments carried by Victor Hess to determine the origin of cosmic radiation, and his discovery in 1912, when he made an ascent to over 5km during a near-total eclipse of the Sun, that radiation had to be coming from further out in space.

Hess on his return from the 1912 balloon ascent – Alan Watson pointed out that this was obviously staged at another time as he would not have been standing looking so well after his ordeal.

I remember looking into the dark skies during a residency at Allenheads Contemporary Arts and wondering about all the activity that I couldn’t see. I decided then I would like to film at 15km where most subatomic cosmic ray activity takes place, even if nothing would show on the film.

A high altitude balloon flight seemed the perfect solution and I was very grateful for the help I subsequently received from Imperial College Space Society and The UK High Altitude Society. The decision to include a cloud chamber in the payload was always a risk and as it turned out nothing of the cosmic ray activity was captured on film. However, the balloon did reach an altitude of over 37km and the payload was successfully recovered with some amazing video footage of its journey.

The record height for a hot air balloon ascent is 21km so in theory it could be possible to send a cloud chamber up in a hot-air balloon and film at altitude with potential for more success if some brave person were on board to operate the camera. Unlikely to be me.

Some intriguing news of ORC’s on the RAS website – The most distant and most powerful ‘odd radio circle’ (ORC) known so far has been discovered by astronomers. These curious rings are a relatively new astronomical phenomenon, having been detected for the first time just six years ago. Only a handful of confirmed examples are known – most of which are 10-20 times the size of our Milky Way galaxy. ORCs are enormous, faint, ring-shaped structures of radio emission surrounding galaxies which are visible only in the radio band of the electromagnetic spectrum and consist of relativistic, magnetised plasma. the three new cosmic rings – discovered not by automated software but by sharp-eyed citizen scientists – represent an important step toward unlocking the secrets of these vast, puzzling structures.

Out and About

A wonderful evening with artist in residence Melanie King at Passengers connecting the celestial with the architecture of the grade II listed Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury, London. Melanie used the residency opportunity to explore the duotone cyanotype process using multiple layers of cyanotype to mimic astronomical imaging construction and even used cyanotypes to create an of the Moon. The beautiful results were presented at an evening event with the additional treat of live telescope viewing of the Moon and Saturn from the second floor terrace of the Brunswick centre under the engaging guidance of astronomer and science communicator Paul Hill.

Liz Elton’s sensitive work Black and Blue (compostable bio materials, cabbage and fruit dye saddened with iron, silk, poppy and sage seeds) showing in A Changed Environment at Messums London. This group show examines changing ideas of beauty, ecology, and sustainability, as well as themes of place, memory, and identity, revealing how connections to the natural world can inspire both understanding and hope. I love the delicacy of this new work and the term ‘saddened by iron’ which is used in the dying process to dull a colour, and which, as Liz says, also emotes the hardships of industrial life.

Cosmic Dust talk by expert on extraterrestrial space dust, and how it can impact astronomy and wider human endeavours in space, Penny Wozniakiewicz at The Royal Astronomical Society. ‘Natural’ cosmic dust is being polluted by man made dust from space debris. This is a real problem created by dead satellites, old upper stages of rockets, fragments form exploded rocket or stages, flecks of paint, aluminium oxide spheres from solid rocket burns, dropped space equipment. When any of this debris collides a cloud of smaller debris is ejected, this process is self propagating and even the tiniest piece of debris can cause serious damage to spacecraft and satellites. This is called the Kessler syndrome, a cascading effect that could render orbital space unusable for generations, threatening satellites, the International Space Station, and future space travel.

Good to visit the The London Group show 2025 at Copeland Gallery where lots of friends are showing excellent work and also to discover new work and artists.

I found Majid Majid’s video Faith Amongst The Ruins a difficult but compelling work. So scary and horrific because we know this is real footage, some of which I had seen before at the time of the attacks on hotels housing asylum seekers and refugees, but it is still so disturbing to watch these people, with so many children present, cheer on the violence. They have no empathy with the terrified people trapped inside the hotel or for the person in the car who is ambushed and stabbed. The glee of those filming the assault is chilling.

He writes: “As a refugee, I know places shaped by fear and rejection. This work revisits UK sites of last summer’s Islamophobic and racist violence, a mosque, a street, and a hotel housing asylum seekers transforming them through prayer. Placing a mat where hostility flared, I reclaim space as sacred ground. Video and traces of violence form a counter-narrative of dignity, belonging, and resilience.”

Images: Majid Majid, Sayako Sugawara, R James Healy, Victoria Rance, Jonathan Armour, Sandra Crisp, Jenny Wiggins, Victoria Arney, Carol Wyss, Sandra Crisp, Genetic Moo, Jacqueline Yuen-Ling Chiu.

Three beautifully directed films screened at FormaHQ as part of The Open Road series of artists moving image works, co-commissioned by a partnership of visual arts organisations. The works are loosely inspired by The Canterbury Tales, drawing from a disparate cast of characters to recount competing stories in a patchwork of styles. David Blandy (Commons), Amaal Said (Open Country) and Sam Williams (The Eel’s Tale) each draw on storytelling traditions to give fresh perspectives on their journeys, on foot, by sea and through time. Heartbreaking to hear how terrified Amaal Said was to leave London for the open country of the south coast, especially with the current rise in overt racism, when out looking for locations and that they did suffer racist abuse while filming. Hers is a gentle and warm study of a mother and daughter and an absent grandmother, a longing for home and to feel ‘at home’. Sam William’s film sets the plight of the highly endangered glass eels who journey 4,000 miles from the Sargasso Sea to the Medway wetlands in Kent, swept along by currents, undergoing bodily transformation, following an instinctive desire on this epic migration alongside two other watery tales of transformative journeys across boundaries of identity and freedom. Coincidently, a recent episode of the Infinite Monkey Cage is all about these mysterious eels. David Blandy turned his attention to the vast and disparate collection of artefacts held in the Tunbridge Wells museum and gave some of these specimens a voice to tell of how they had lived before they became a part of this collective of human taxonomy.

Cristina Iglesias The Shore at Hauser & Wirth features large-scale bronze works from the artist’s Littoral (Lunar Meteorite) series, part of her ongoing exploration of geological themes. The word ‘littoral’ refers to something relating to or situated along a coast or shore, or the region where the land meets the water. The weightiness of the objects is impressive ( I can’t imagine how they were brought into the gallery even with the technology available today – after coming here from the talk on stone henge and the incredible feat of bringing the standing stones across rough terrain for many kilometres and up a slope 5000 years ago seems even more impossible – yet there they are). The sound of water bubbling within each piece draws you to peer within and stay with the piece perhaps longer. The audience is invited to touch the sculptures. The bronze is polished and does need to be used and worn away in a more effective organic and dirty process. They are very clean.

The Royal Astronomical Society lecture Sighting the Sun and Moon? at Stonehenge – by Archaeoastronomist Prof. Clive Ruggles. Debunking many myths and overspeculation, concerning the use of the monument for observations of the sky the professor was clear about what can sensibly be said about the relationship of Stonehenge to the Sun, considering the conventional archaeological evidence that has been uncovered in recent years. He also recommended visiting the day before or after the actual solstice if possible for an experience without the many crowds as the alignment is almost identical. Also visiting at sunset can be just as magical and quieter. He turned his attention to the Moon, questioning if our prehistoric forebears also celebrated the occurrence of a major lunar standstill, an event occurring every 18.6 years around which time the Moon can be seen at fortnightly intervals exceptionally far to the north and south.

Karl Singporewala’s sculptural interpretations of Zoroastrian symbolism in Cosmos, Memory, Scale at SOAS Gallery convey a meditation on how material and memory intersect to shape the human experience. Cosmos speaks to both his fascination with astrophysics together with a metaphysical belief in the alignments of life. Stars and geometric forms recur as motifs, refracting both spiritual navigation and mathematical structure. Memory is treated as a living, shifting phenomenon. Inspired by oral tradition, family stories and inherited rituals. Scale, is used both literally and metaphorically in shifting perspectives and unexpected relationships. Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds.

Dusty, chalky mythical drawings and solar eclipse traces from Tacita Dean in Black, Grey, Green and White at Frith Street Gallery Golden Square.

I spent a happy morning at the Geologists Association Festival of Geology 2025. This included a fascinating lecture The Early Evolution of Animal Life by palaeobiologist Frankie Dunn focused on the origin and early evolution of animals and particularly on the fossil record of the late Ediacaran Period (approximately 570 – 540 million years ago) – just before the Cambrian explosion of life. The aim of her research is to understand how animal body plans evolved in deep time. There also was some amazing and unique pudding stone on display.

I also picked up a great little book full of wonderful geologically enriching words by Marcia Bjornerud.

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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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Matter

December 4, 2022 //
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It was such a pleasure to show with Sandra Crisp and Jockel Liess at Saturation Point. We were very pleased with how our films worked together in Projected Topographies and reflected out into the night skies of London.

Sandra Crisp: E_Life uses 3D generated animation, presenting intensely textured and dynamic geometry sequenced over time.

Multiple constantly transforming organic forms, each originating from a simple 3D sphere are mapped with eclectic visuals such as emojis, fragmented images borrowed from 24-hour online rolling-news media and others downloaded via a search engine. Particle systems generate repeated, yet varied objects throughout the film which appear to have a life of their own. Overall suggesting the possibility of a simulated future/ nature.

Jockel Liess: Variations on a theme is a generative audiovisual system which starts from a point of fascination with the aesthetics of irregular organic patterns.

Visually as well as sonically the aesthetic of natural patterns thrives on their intrinsic imperfection which are never distributed even or orderly, are never replications of themselves. They are rather reoccurring variations that form a recognisable tapestry of familiarity across an otherwise chaotic and unpredictable structure. Prospering from the tension that arises between repetition and asymmetry, and playfully inhabit the border region between order and randomness.

Susan Eyre: Aóratos transports the viewer between everyday locations and terrains visually transformed via use of an endoscope, a microscope,and cameras launched in a high altitude balloon.

It is not impossible that wormholes exist in our universe.

Aóratos imagines journeying through hidden landscapes, distorted spacetime and alternative perspectives. Envisaging potential encounters with cosmic strings, space foam, primordial chemistry, radioactive particles and escaping gravity the work conjectures on the enduring allure of traversing a wormhole.

Black holes were once thought to be pure science fiction but in recent decades scientists have discovered that these extraordinary objects exist throughout our universe in all shapes and sizes and  astoundingly have even produced images of them.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity written in 1915 predicted the existence of black holes and is also consistent with the possibility of gravitational tunnels known as wormholes. It could be that there is a hidden web of planck scale wormholes linking all points in space. Theoretically, threaded through these tiny holes would be filaments of cosmic strings created in the primitive goo of early matter and flung across space when the universe burst into existence.

To traverse space by means of a wormhole would require vast amounts of negative energy, not something usually found on Earth yet in the current political climate in no short supply.

The risks and obstacles of entering a wormhole include creating enough negative energy to open the wormhole mouth wide enough to weaken the gravitational tidal forces which would rip travellers apart; keeping it from collapsing so travellers are not indefinitely trapped inside; exceeding the speed of light and avoiding incineration from deadly high radiation.

The video work explores hidden landscapes, the distortion of space and the permeability of barriers such as force fields and human skin to the unseen particles that constantly teem at near light speed across the universe.

Edge of atmosphere footage was achieved with the help of Sena Harayama, Romain Clement De Givry and Medad Newman from Imperial College Space Society supervised by senior lecturer in spacecraft engineering Dr Aaron Knoll. We also had help from the UK High Altitude Society. My ambition was to film cosmic particles at the point where most of the activity of collisions takes place, about 15km up and so we launched a cloud chamber in the payload of a high-altitude balloon. Unfortunately the prepared chamber was broken the night before the launch and the replacement was not really adequate. Also due to a turbulent launch the camera inside the payload was knocked to one side so we were unable to film this cosmic activity but did get amazing footage above the clouds, gained a height of 35km and successfully retrieved the payload from a field of horses.

Space travellers can ‘see’ cosmic rays as they pass through the retina and cause the rods and cones to fire, triggering a flash of light that is really not there. The retina functions as a mini cloud chamber where the recording of a cosmic ray is displayed by a trail left in its wake.

Aóratos translates as ‘unseen’.

It was a real treat to be invited by Alan Smith and Helen Ratcliff for a short residency at Allenheads Contemporary Arts in Northumberland as part of the Being Human Festival – a celebration of humanities research through public engagement with North Pennines Observatory at Allenheads Contemporary Arts partnering with Durham University to present an evening of discussion and potential stargazing. After a few days of conversations, preparing presentations and meeting the other speakers we were looking forward to the event but unfortunately this was cancelled at the last minute due to flood warnings in the area. We are hoping it can be rescheduled.

While the weather was clear I headed to Allenheads village for a walk and called in at the Blacksmith’s forge where I had previously shown Aóratos as a site specific participatory installation.

I am appreciative of the dark skies in this location which feels like it is on top of the planet and therefore closer to the sky. I live in south west London so it is a real treat to be away from light pollution. While there, I was keen to make some time lapse film of the stars circling Polaris as research for work about the earth’s magnetic field and magnetoreception. Birds can see the magnetic field and use this extra sense as well as the sun, the moon and the stars to navigate on their migration routes. I am also speculating about the possibility for humans to sense the magnetic field

As the centuries go by, the North Celestial Pole shifts and different stars become the North Star. It takes about 25,800 years for the Earth’s axis to complete a single wobble. Polaris became the north star in about the fifth century and will get closer to straight above the Earth’s north pole until sometime in 2102. Before Polaris was the North Star it was Thuban and next up is Vega.

The skies were clear for a few hours when I first arrived at ACA so I was able to build a short star trail sequence but after that the fog and then the rain settled in.

When reading about the history of Hartland Magnetic Observatory, established in 1955, it mentions ‘A permanent distant mark or azimuth mark was erected on a concrete obelisk 7 or 8 feet high near the site’s northern boundary. Viewed through the window in the north wall of the Absolute Hut, its azimuth is 11º27’54” E of N. It is still in use today.’ I was intrigued that an obelisk should be used for the azimuth mark. I had hoped to see it on my research trip to Hartland but found it is currently inaccessible with just the tip protruding from dense undergrowth.

I am reimagining this object as a sculpture made from stacked recycled paper to appear stratified like the sedimentary rock that holds clues to the Earth’s magnetic field reversals and am working to the dimension ratios recommended to avoid emotional unrest.

Obelisk dimensions from “The Problem of Obelisks” catalogued by Egyptologist with the Cairo Museum Reginald Engelbach, 1923.

Before the Meridian Line was moved to Greenwich, London time was calculated from the King’s Observatory at Kew.
There are three obelisks in the Old Deer Park used as meridian marks to adjust the instruments at the Observatory built by George III to observe the transit of Venus in 1769.

As I plan to make the obelisk pyramidion in copper I signed up for the Sheet Copper Sculpture Worksop taught by Robert Worley at The London Sculpture Workshop. To begin we were shown how to beat out a bowl shape and apply a dark patina using chemicals and heat.

I was introduced to the plasma gun. Very satisfying cutting with the fourth state of matter. These shapes are based on the fluid fluctuations of the Earth’s geomagnetic field and I plan to use these on the north wall of The Absolute Hut sculpture in my show next year, tacked over moss with copper pins.

Magnetism is caused by the motion of electric charges. Electrons spinning around the nucleus in atoms generate an electric current and cause each electron to act like a tiny magnet. In most substances, equal numbers of electrons spin in opposite directions, which cancels out their magnetism. In iron, cobalt, and nickel, most of the electrons spin in the same direction which makes the atoms in these substances strongly magnetic. By rubbing a piece of iron along a magnet, the north-seeking poles of the atoms in the iron line up in the same direction creating a magnetic field and turning the iron into a magnet. A magnetic field can also be created by running electricity through a coil of wire, but the field will disappear when the electric current is turned off.

Work in progress on Breath of Stars (the cosmic ray detector interactive video) has been to convert all the .avi star burst video files to VP8.webm using Shutter Encoder software. Jamie, the programmer, has code working now to display video files with transparency so they can be layered.

Gallery Visits

Simon Leahy-Clark solo show FEED at Artworks Project Space. Painterly surfaces made from newspaper clippings have unexpected depth in palette, flow and cosmic imagery, considering the origin of each segment. Mesmerizing to study the forms like spotting patterns in the constellations. Really liked this work.

Caroline AreskogJones Tonight Rain, Tomorrow Mud at Filet Space with live sonic response from Oskar Jones incorporating field recordings gathered whilst walking in Andalucía and captured acoustics whilst making the drawings.

A thoughtfully crafted exhibition capturing the fragile landscape that turns to dust without water and mud when the rains come. The beautiful audio accompaniment from Oskar added to the meditative experience of being transported elsewhere while having time to focus of the works installed with a resonant delicacy.

Lisa Chang Lee showing HZ-0 at Enclave Projects Lake, a sensory device created in collaboration with James Wilkie that creates soundscapes responding to the void around it. Equipped with seven sensors measuring temperature, light, air pollution, sound etc data is fed into an algorithmic software based on the Lydian scale. I hadn’t heard of this scale but am interested to discover it’s connections to gravity and magnetism. The Lydian Chromatic Scale is the most complete expression of the total self-organized tonal gravity field with which all tones relate on the basis of their close to distant magnetism to a Lydian tonic. Tonal gravity is the heart of the Lydian Chromatic Concept. Simply put, the basic building block of tonal gravity is the interval of the perfect fifth. Every tone within Western music’s equal tempered tuning relates to every other tone by either being close to – or distant from – the center of gravity, which is the tonic (or “DO”) of the Lydian Scale. There are 3 states of tonal gravity: Vertical, Horizontal, and Supra-Vertical.

This is a fascinating work thinking about other ways to experience a space.

Hollow Earth: Art, Caves & The Subterranean Imaginary at Nottingham Contemporary.

Inspired by the hundreds of caves hand carved into the rock beneath the city of Nottingham this exhibition explores questions of thresholds, darkness and prehistory. ‘Every culture and religion has told stories about what lies beneath. Caves are where extraordinary events come to pass, the domain of gods and monsters, of births, burial and rebirth. Dark, dangerous and unstable, caves are places of visions and experiences both sacred and profane. More recently, they have become home to data farms, seed vaults and doomsday bunkers.’

Artists include: Hamed Abdalla, Lee Bontecou, Sofia Borges, Brassaï, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Steven Claydon, Matt Copson, Juan Downey, Chioma Ebinama, Mary Beth Edelson, Laura Emsley, Barry Flanagan, Ilana Halperin, Frank Heath, Ed Herring, Michael Ho, Hans Hollein, Peter Hujar, Athanasius Kircher, Alison Knowles, Antti Lovag, Goshka Macuga, René Magritte, Gordon Matta-Clark, Emma McCormick-Goodhart, Santu Mofokeng, Henry Moore, Nadar, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Pauline Oliveros, Lydia Ourahmane, Gordon Parks, Flora Parrott, Walter Pichler, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Liv Preston, Ben Rivers, Robert Smithson, Michelle Stuart, N.H. Stubbing, Caragh Thuring, Kaari Upson, Jeff Wall, Aubrey Williams, Joseph Wright of Derby.

This was a research trip with Julie Hill towards our joint show next year. The geological resonates through both our work, for Julie through the deep chasms of geology echoing those occurring cosmologically and for myself in the generation of the geomagnetic field deep in the earth which emanates out, reaching into space.

EVERY CLOUD at Bruce Castle Museum.

Nine artists celebrate the life and work of the Namer of Clouds and Tottenham resident, Luke Howard (1772 – 1864) to mark the 250th Anniversary of his birth.

Artists include Tam Joseph, Andrew Miller, Doodleganger, Gabriela Schutz, Helen Currie, Kerry Duggan, Lisa-Marie Price, Mary Yacoob, Siân Dorman with a live cloud sculpture performance from Alexander Costello.

Tam Joseph gave a heartfelt speech about his discovery of Luke Howard from seeing a blue plaque with the citation ‘Namer of Clouds’ which to him spoke of first nation peoples connection to nature and piqued his curiosity to learn more about this poetic origin; the difficulty of painting clouds – never from a photograph – a cloud is never still and a photograph loses the inherent transience; and the shared passion for the shapes and patterns found in the ocean of air above our heads.

Reading

Some history of early speculation, experiments and discoveries of three men who respectively broke new ground in understanding the Earth’s magnetic field, measuring time mechanically and mapping the hidden strata of the Earth.

Latitude and The Magnetic Earth by Stephen Pumfrey. The story of William Gilbert (1544 – 1603), a radical new thinker who questioned the perceived Aristotelian philosophy of the day, developing his own theory of magnetic philosophy of the Earth. His book On the Magnet and Magnetic Bodies, and on the Great Magnet the Earth was published in 1600 in which he concluded that the Earth was itself magnetic.

The lines of latitude and longitude remain fixed as the world flexes and shifts beneath them. Extraordinary to think these lines were drawn centuries BCC and mapped by Ptolemy in the second century on his many atlases.

The zero degree line of latitude is fixed by nature whereas that of longitude is a political decision. The founding philosophy of the Greenwich Observatory viewed astronomy as a means to an end – all the stars needed to be catalogued to chart a course for sailors to cross the globe. Ptolemy first set the meridian off the northwest coast of Africa and many countries set their own starting point for 0 longitude. Eventually, after publication of a series of star charts beginning in 1767, made by the then Royal Astronomer, that became used world wide for nautical navigation, Greenwich was declared prime meridian of the world in 1884 (except by France who took another 27 years to accept the decision).

Longitude by Dava Sobel tells the story of the battle between proponents of the lunar distance method and the mechanical clock to solve the problem of determining longitude at sea. Astronomers and engineers became adversaries spurred by a financial reward offered to the one who came up the most accurate and reliable method. John Harrison (1693 – 1776) carpenter turned clockmaker spent his life perfecting the marine chronometer.

The Map That Changed The World by Simon Winchester might have some historical merit in telling the story of William ‘Strata’ Smith (1769 – 1839) but I found it over perambulatory in the telling.

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SPACE

November 5, 2022 //
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Work in progress on the Azimuth Obelisk sculpture has taken a new direction and I have abandoned the idea of casting the obelisk in aerated concrete. I also have new dimensions to work with having found an interesting article on the historic dimensions of obelisks with the advice that ‘designs that have too large a gap in scaling between elements will lack hierarchical cooperation and lead to a sense of emotional unrest‘.

Looking at layering of sedimentary rock holding memory of magnetic field information I am aiming to make the sculpture from layered paper to echo the effect of strata, using unwanted old work on paper as well as other paper that would otherwise be discarded. It has been satisfying tearing down old prints that were languishing in plan chests and old work from foundation courses and art classes. It even has an obelisk within the obelisk. I am collecting donations from everyone I know who works with paper as I have estimated I need about 8,000 sheets to reach a height of over 2m.

Work in progress on The Breath of Stars cosmic ray interactive work is still pending. After spending hours formatting and loading the raspberry pi with the video files of cosmic trail starbursts I heard from Jamie the programmer that .avi files are not going to work and these might need converting to WebM files which might not be easy. Hoping to find a solution to this soon.

Great fun greenscreen filming slime for Belly of a Rock – a video sculpture partly inspired by the Cosmicomics story The Spiral and partly inspired by paleomagnetism where magnetic minerals in rocks can archive a record of the direction and intensity of the magnetic field when they form.

“I began to give off excretions which took on a curving shape all around” The Spiral, Italo Calvino

“..I accompanied the effort of making the shell with the effort of thinking I was making something, that is anything: that is, I thought of all the things it would be possible to make. So it wasn’t even a monotonous task, because the effort of thinking which accompanied it spread towards countless types of thoughts which spread, each one, towards countless types of actions that might each serve to make countless things, and making each of these things was implicit in making the shell grow, turn after turn…” Italo Calvino The Spiral

Fabulous shells lent to me by my neighbour for spiralling inspiration. The size of them not easily appreciated in these images. They are huge. I have no idea how old the molluscs that made these could be.

Other work in progress is towards using the small monitors bought as a good deal on eBay set in a circle displaying video dissected into twelfths. Testing ideas with kaleidoscopic images from soap bubble videos and relying on technical help from next door getting the monitors to work

Delighted to be invited to join Sandra Crisp and Jockel Liess for an exciting moving image event. Each artist has a unique approach to film incorporating the study of form, surface and location. DM for an invitation.

Sandra Crisp: E_Life uses 3D generated animation to present a digital environment populated with intensely textured and dynamic geometry.

Jockel Liess: Variations on a theme is a generative audiovisual system which starts from a point of fascination with the aesthetics of irregular organic patterns.

My work Aóratos (new edit for this event) transports the viewer between everyday locations and terrains visually transformed via the use of an endoscope, a microscope, and cameras launched in a high-altitude balloon.

Paused to see the wonderful World Time Linear Clock at Piccadilly Circus Underground Station built in the early1920s and recently refurbished.

The band of roman numerals scrolls West at the same relative speed as the earth rotates, completing a circuit in 24 hours.

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

I also did a little research to find out more about the Azimuth Mirror I was given as a present. An azimuth mirror is used for taking the bearings of terrestrial and celestial objects. An azimuth is defined, from any given observation point, as the angle between an object or point and a reference line, usually to true North, moving away from that reference line in a clockwise direction on a horizontal plane. Through the use of mirrors, lenses and prisms, the instrument allows both, the readings of the compass card, and the object to be seen at the same time and in the same direction. It is portable equipment which is placed over a magnetic or gyro compass to aid navigation using either a landmark, when the arrows would be pointed down, or from a celestial object when the arrow would be pointed up. The little glass circle was once a spirit level but that has dried up. The word azimuth is used in all European languages today, it originates from medieval Arabic meaning “the directions”.

Finally made it to meet the Go Stargazing Walton Astronomy Group at their monthly session. We found them on the green at Esher which has been recently over illuminated with bright LED streetlights by a thoughtless council ruining the skies for astronomical observation and disorientating local wildlife and plant life. The local MP Dominic Raab IS NOT A MEMBER of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Dark Skies. Click on the link and ask your MP to join in protecting our dark skies.

When we look up to the heavens, we largely see the same view that captivated and inspired our ancestors. The constellations, the Milky Way, shooting stars, and the night sky are woven into the fabric of our society, cultures and religions. The night sky is one of the most inspirational views that our planet offers.

We are on the precipice of losing the night sky. Right now, SpaceX and other companies are planning to launch tens of thousands of bright satellites in orbit around the Earth.

There is an Avaaz petition at this link urging protection of the night skies.

Bringing back memories of the 2015 Nelly Ben Hayoun film Disaster Playground…

….NASA celebrates a Smashing Success – A team of researchers confirmed that the DART spacecraft’s impact with Dimorphos successfully altered the moonlet’s orbit around its parent asteroid by 32 minutes – marking the first time humans have changed the trajectory of a celestial object in space.

To me this feels like a major historical event. What has this little nudge set in motion?

Exhibition visits

Expanded film at the BFI London Film festival.

Framerate: Pulse of the Earth by ScanLAB Projects presents Destruction, extraction, habitation, construction, harvests, growth and erosion are presented as a shared immersive experience. The 3D time-lapse scans of British landscapes observe change on a scale impossible to see with traditional filmmaking techniques.

One of my favourites was Monoliths by Lucy Hammond, Hannah Davies, Asma Elbadawi and Carmen Marcus – we are shaped by the spaces that made us. Through footage shot in the north of England and personal narrative the women embody three monoliths – standing stones, whose symbolic power becomes increasingly important as the women talk.

Elizabeth Murton and Jane Glynn, explore the dynamics of time and movement in Fluid Time at The WaterMill, Mill Green Museum, Hatfield with live dance performance of Elizabeth Murton’s The Giant Weave from BEEE Creative full of joy and energy.

Libby Heaney in remiQXing still at Fiumano Clase. A solo presentation of video and physical works exploring the emerging field of quantum computing as both a subject and medium, turning the gallery space into the showroom of her fictional quantum computing company QX (Quantum eXperience). Some fabulous super shiny prints on mirrored dibond and ethereal prints direct to media on clear acrylic.

Transports of Delight at Danielle Arnaud curated by Edward Chell. In the 1830s, East London doctor and amateur naturalist Dr Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward invented a sealed glass case, an ecosphere in which plants could survive heavily polluted air. Named after its inventor the Wardian case enabled the transport of plants by sea around the world and transformed global economies and environments, shaping the world we live in. Exhibition includes works by

Anna Barriball | Daphne Wright | David Cotterrell | Edward Chell | Gerard Ortín Castellví | Günther Herbst | Harun Morrison | Helen Maurer | Joseph Banks | Joy Gregory | Laure Prouvost | Lee Maelzer | Leelou Gordon-Fox | Maria Thereza Alves | Mariele Neudecker | Nick Laessing | Nils Norman | Owen Griffiths | Peter Hofer | Pia Östlund | Rosa Nguyen | Stephen Lee | Uriel Orlow |

ABSURD at OHSH Projects exploring the absurdity and strange rituals of our daily lives, the bizarreness of
which are brought to light when taken out of context. The institutions, structures and traditions we have built around ourselves and imbued with power and importance can highlight this most starkly; through religion, schooling, government, work and even our own homes. Curated by Henry Hussey and Sophia Olver. Exhibition includes works by Gillies Adamson Semple, Samuel Bassett, Jonny Briggs, Tom Bull, Ladina Clement, Janina Frye, Johnny Hogland, Mark Jackson, Lea Rose Kara, James Lomax, Hynek Martinec, Rasmus Nosstring and Lottie Stoddart.

Hypha Studios presents a showcase of some previously selected artists at the project space on Conduit Street. Hypha Studios matches artists with empty spaces across the UK. Artworks include those by Beverley Duckworth, Foka Wolf, Dion Kitson, Futures After and Josh Wright’s “Lost in a Just In time Supply Chain”, Anna Fearon, Tom Skipp, Molly Stredwick, Gabriela Pelczarska, Salvatore Pione.

Subatomic at The Science Gallery is a project by composer Christo Squier and experimental particle physicist Dr. Teppei Katori that looks at ways of interacting with cosmic rays, something I have been working on myself in the work The Breath of Stars for the last year or so. I was equally excited and anxious to see what they were presenting. They have created a particle shrine which takes data from the Super-Kamiokande observatory in Japan as well as live data from cosmic ray detectors to create a light and sound experience with vibrating mirrors. Rather jealous of the technical resources this project had access to.

There was also a performance of live music by a small orchestra responding in real time to data from the Super-Kamiokande observatory and compositions inspired by cosmic ray observation data.

A lot of the data used in the music responses and the particle shrine is publicly available data from the Super-Kamiokande observatory in Japan. I did notice that the cosmic watch detectors hooked up to the particle shrine are not set in coincidence mode to be sure it is cosmic particles that are being recorded. A lot of what Christo said during his presentation echoed how I feel about cosmic rays, the fact that they come from other galaxies and pass through us making that physical connection with outer space.

Sanctuary at The Swiss Church takes inspiration from the disparate and striking surrounding architecture, and the stories of people within the Covent Garden community, artists Ali Clarke and Gary Scholes have created a series of structures that symbolise individual sanctuaries. Amazing detail in some of the constructions, especially impressed with the scaffolding bolts.

Reading

Came across some great finds at the local Oxfam bookshop on mapping and magnetism and time, all interconnected.

I read Conquest of the Useless as I thought it might be relevant to research on exploration of the unknown. It was definitely a worthwhile read portraying the total dedication to following through a dream, the power of the creative urge. Watched the film Fitzcarraldo afterwards which although extraordinary doesn’t convey the true life drama and hardship recorded in the book experienced by the actors and film crew in telling the story.

Listening

BBC Radio 4 In our Time – The Earth’s Core. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Earth’s solid inner core and liquid outer core, their structures and their impact on life on Earth.

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