New year fresh start. Laboratory of Dark Matters evaluation reports submitted. Now to build on my research from the last year. Time to put up the dark tent again and get the cloud chamber running to take some more controlled footage for use in an immersive installation. Excited to be experimenting with video projections, lenses and different media to project onto to ‘capture’ the particles.
Sun Factor jostling for space at a busy Atom Gallery private view of Tomorrow’s World where most visions of the future appear dystopian or apocalyptic.
The backstory to this work begins with a holiday to Sardinia and the day trip salesman’s insistence the island bay he proposes taking us to – it’s paradise, it’s paradise … well how could we refuse. It turned out we were to be cast ashore for hours on a tiny strip of sand with no shade, no escape and a sea swarming with tiny stinging jellyfish. A concrete obelisk stood over the blistering bodies; once ancient sun worshippers built these capped with gold to shine like beacons celebrating the power of Ra the sun god. Modern sun worshippers have their own rituals, laying under a hot ball of gas so massive and so hot it has been active for 4.5 billion years yet it will be another 4.5 billion years before it will expand into a red giant, vaporize the earth and explode.
On a rather grander scale was ( my past RCA tutor) David Blandy’s The End of the World at Seventeen Gallery.
Designed for solo viewing, a single seat faces the enormity of space. You become the lonely astronaut gazing down on a faraway world, at once familiar and distant. The voiceover poignantly recounts what is being lost; spanning perspectives, the micro and macrocosm of life, imagined, virtual and real. When the end is in sight senses are heightened.
Touched to hear that David thought of me when making the High Definition series splicing microchips, crystals, nebulae and rock formations into stars which appear 3D until you approach more closely and then they flatten. Heptagrams (seven point stars)share Christian and pagan symbolism, they can represent the seven days of creation, the perfection of god and the seven planets which were known to ancient alchemists.
The installation HD LIfestyle also plays with the illusion of surface and the material cost of being able to pass through the screen to an ever more real and immersive experience on the other side. The wares are on display. The images sweep us forward. It would be hard to stop.
Thomas Ruff at Whitechapel Gallery. He is big on scale, control and appropriation. I was struck by the regularity and precision of the white dot of light reflection in each of the portrait models eyes.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launched 2005 recorded topography, water related minerals and climate using an imaging spectrometer, context camera and mars colour imager transmitted as radio signals to be translated into images.
Thomas Ruff ma.r.s.
SPACE/London Creative Network Showcase – showing works in progress as part of an ongoing exploration of new technologies employed within art practice.
Catriona Leahy uses laser-cutting technology to etch delicate capillaries onto marble to articulate a sense of fragmentation and the scarring of manmade intervention in the form of land drainage found in Dutch and Belgian post industrial landscapes.
Catriona Leahy Percolation Test
Always drawn to the perpendicular – the standing stones. I enjoyed Ben Branagan’s legacy of the built environment captured in totems made from building site aggregates.
Ben Branagan Hardcore Colonnade
Next door was the satisfyingly ritual space of BearMotherhouse a collaboration of Fourthland, an artist collective, with Xenia a group that brings geographically displaced women together with local communities for friendship and integration through creativity. A quote from the accompanying essay by Alberto Duman addressing the cosmological connections and mythologies of the objects that ‘ speak of the degrees of interconnectedness beyond human knowing and the evocation of powerful figures such as the Bear and the Mother that oversee and mesmerise this house’s proceedings‘
Cryptic exhibition at The Crypt Gallery, St Pancras Church examines the relationship between art, science and technology. Lisa Pettibone explores matter and form through the manipulation of one template and the forces applied to alter its appearance.
Lisa Pettibone Apeiron 01_02_03
Pentagon envy.
Bekk Wells Elements
Imagining CERN event at CSM presented the results of creative collisions between interdisciplinary art and particle physics. MA Art and Science students got to visit CERN, collaborate with scientists and make work in response.
Gavin Hesketh was here to talk about his work at CERN searching for new particles
He had brought his cloud chamber along. First time I had seen someone else’s cloud chamber other than online. No dark tent here.
In particle physics the closer you look the more similar things become,
when you get right down to the elementary particles there is no colour at this scale
Susan Eyre 