Parallaxis – final installation

I’ve been back on campus at Lancaster University this week installing the final part of my temporary artwork, Parallaxis, a series of window installations along the Spine – the main walkway through the university campus. Having had some time away from the project, it’s been good to be immersed in it again and to have the space to reflect on the experience of working on the Spine project.

One of the (many) aspects of this project that appealed when I saw it advertised was the chance to get to know the university. I’ve lived in Lancaster for six years, but I didn’t study at the university, and have only visited occasionally for exhibitions and concerts. So having a ‘legitimate’ reason to spend a lot of time on the campus, meet researchers and work as part of a team with the department that commissioned the work, was really exciting.

The Spine was designed by Gabriel Epstein in the sixties to provide a walkway through the length of the campus, bring people together, encourage conversation and create a lively combination of spaces that are occupied throughout the day and evening. Academic, administration, commercial, residential and service buildings sit side by side, which gives it a bit of a high street feel.

The Spine has its own rhythm, much of which I haven’t experienced, as I’ve been working on campus over the summer break, but I’ve enjoyed the way the pace of life varies according to the time of day and what events are happening. I’m looking forward to visiting during Welcome Week when the students arrive and it becomes much busier.

It’s been an interesting way to get to know a place – I’ve spent much of my time on the Spine installing work on the windows, so a lot of what I’ve seen of the campus was by way of the window reflections. But… the windows are very reflective, and, with my back to the flow of people along the Spine, I’ve seen and heard a lot. I felt the anxiety that was flying about on results day and the nervous excitement of the 17 year olds and their parents who visited on open days. I’ve chatted to lecturers, cleaners, students, porters, visitors, caterers and many others; being stationed on the Spine all day does indeed seem to encourage conversation. I’ve enjoyed talking to people about my work and what they see in it, their own research, their experiences of the campus and life in Lancaster. Sometimes I felt invisible and sometimes far too visible; I’m a natural observer, so the ‘spectacle’ aspect of installing work in public places doesn’t come easily to me. But that occasional discomfort is worth it for the connections with people and unique perspective and insight into a place that come with it. It’s been a treat, and I hope I find other reasons to be back on campus in the future.

Here are some photos of the most recent installations, with lots of views and reflections of the campus…

Parallaxis (Lancaster University’s Spine project)

It’s two months since I started working with Lancaster University’s Astrophysics department on the Spine project – creating artwork to be displayed along the main walkway of the university campus, the Spine. My first blog explains my initial research and starting points.

The final work, called Parallaxis, is a series of window installations along the northern half of the Spine. Based on ideas used in the cosmic distance ladder (a system of techniques for measuring distance in space) and collective knowledge, each piece in Parallaxis consists of three visual elements that are presented differently according to their position along the Spine, representing the behaviour of matter and energy in the expanding universe.

Parallax means: ‘The effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions, e.g. through the viewfinder and the lens of a camera…from Greek parallaxis “a change”’, and is one of the techniques used in the cosmic distance ladder. It’s often explained using the fact that if you look at the same object with each eye individually it appears to move, and this is something I find myself doing a lot, for instance when looking out of a window and trying to line certain things up in my eyeline. I’ve got no idea if this is something that other people do, but it seemed to sum up how I’d like the work to be viewed!

Installation

This happened in three stages…

First, the big background shapes, which represent the increasing speed at which the universe is expanding. The shapes nearest the centre of the Spine are simpler (showing a slower speed) and made up of one or two pieces, while the shapes at the outer edges of the Spine are more complex (showing a faster speed) and made up out of seven or eight pieces.

Next, I added the line to each piece, which represents how condensed the universe is: the lines nearest the centre of the Spine are most complicated (showing the more condensed universe), and they become simpler as you walk further out along the Spine (and as the universe expands).

Finally, I added a gold pattern to each piece, the appearance of which is determined by the position and shape of the line and background shape. On each installation I found the halfway point between where the line enters and leaves the background shape. This point marked the centre of the gold pattern, and I then added a gold square 5cm away from this midpoint in line with anywhere else that the line leaves/enters the background shape. After that I added further squares in line with the placement of the first ones, again 5cm apart.

These gold patterns represent new discoveries in science: using two known constants (in this case the background shape and the line) to reveal the information (where the gold pattern will go). This meant that I didn’t know how each piece would look until it was finished. It was genuinely exciting to add the gold layer and see how the placement of the other elements created the final compositions. For example, in some pieces, the line only enters and leaves the background shape once, which means the gold pattern will be formed in a line. But when there is a complex line that enters and leaves the background shape many times, the gold forms a series of concentric circles and looks very different.

Colour

The colour of the background shape changes gradually along the Spine, referencing redshift, one of the ways of measuring distance in the universe. At the start of the Spine, the shapes are purple and blue (representing matter that is closest – in distance and in time), and they gradually change to red at the outer edges (representing matter that is further away – in distance and in time).

Ways of seeing

As the work will be onsite for a few months, I wanted to create something that would not always look the same. People can view the installations from the inside and the outside, and the way the light either reflects off or shines through the pieces affects the appearance a lot. On a sunny day, coloured pools of light appear on the floor or on the frosted safety vinyl or blinds on the insides of the windows. At night, the colour doesn’t show up very well from the outside, but the gold reflects light and these patterns become really prominent. When the lights are on, the colours glow a lot more. I hope that people who are on campus a lot will enjoy the experience of seeing the pieces in different light conditions and from different viewpoints and keep noticing some of the smaller pieces that are harder to spot. The poster at the end of this post is displayed on the student noticeboards along the Spine, which includes tear-off strips with suggestions of ways that the work can be viewed.

What next?

First, a rest! I’ve had a very intense (and enjoyable) few months, being totally immersed in this project, but it’s time to step back for a few weeks and reflect on the process and all the conversations I’ve had along the way. In August I’ll be installing more pieces along the South Spine, and these will stay up until the end of September.

Lancaster University's Spine project

I’ve just started a project with Lancaster University’s Astrophysics department to create artwork along the main walkway of the university campus, the Spine. The 1-km long Spine, originally designed to provide a path through the campus that follows the natural gradient of the land, has recently been remodelled to include greenery, open spaces and social areas. This commission is about celebrating that area by using it as a site for artwork and using artists’ perspectives to find new ways to share the university’s research.

I’m going to create a series of installations on windows along the length of the spine: big, bright translucent vinyl pieces that help lead people along their journey through the campus. The work will launch at the National Astronomy Meeting 2019 in July, a week-long conference for astronomy professionals, with a scientific programme and outreach/cultural events. I’m hoping that the delegates will be able to take part in the creation of some of the work over the course of the conference, and I’ll be on site installing all week. Also creating work for the event is Nicola Rae, who produces beautiful sonic visualisations.

I’ve spent the first few weeks immersed in research. I’ve been reading about… black holes, cosmic distance, galaxy formation, supernovae, dark matter and dark energy, and a lot of other stuff. I find it hard to stay focused when I’m reading about such huge distances, unimaginable lengths of time and questions that I will never know the answer to. I get overwhelmed, and switch off, telling myself there’s no point in reading more if I’m not going to find out ‘what happens’ (I hate watching films/reading books that don’t give me a nicely tied-up ending). But I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did. I started to understand how, although the big questions might not get answered yet, lots of small questions are being answered all the time, and when you put these small answers together they tell you some big things. These small answers only exist because of the thousands of years’ worth of questions that have been already asked, and answered. Knowledge builds on knowledge.

The research period is short, so I needed to learn a lot quickly, and I made the most of audiobooks (learning in the bath) and videos, as well as reading books, articles and academic papers. I read through some educational modules and completed (correctly, yes!) the mathematical equations at the end. I got pointed in the right direction by the Observational Astrophysics group’s weekly coffee, where everyone told me about their own individual research areas. It was one of those moments, which sometimes happen on art projects, where I felt like I’d been parachuted into someone else’s life, and I loved every minute.

The more I read, the more I understood, and the more possibilities appeared for what this project could look like. But I kept coming back to the same point: scientists use what they know to tell them what they don’t know. This is probably not such a revelation to some people, but for me it really helped to fill in the gaps and make things more manageable.

I was also struck by the way that working on such big questions necessitates a collaboration. Telescopes aren’t always powerful enough to tell us what we’re looking for but when lots of telescopes look at the same thing, all this information can be combined. This means people, institutions and countries working together, and knowledge being passed down from generations before. I hope I can get some of that across in my work – the idea of us being greater than the sum of our parts, and achieving more when we work together.

There are different ways of measuring distance in the universe depending on how far away the thing you want to measure is, and put together these methods make the cosmic distance ladder. As I understand it, each rung of this ladder uses the knowledge from the rung below, and all the methods of measurement use existing knowledge and known constants to establish distance. It’s about learning from the relationships between things, their similarities and their differences – they all tell us something.

So… I have an idea for work that is based on three elements: two constants and one unknown. The placement of the first two elements will determine the placement and appearance of the third element, meaning that I’ll get that rush of excitement as I install each piece and discover what each one will look like. I’m busy trying this out and creating test pieces at the moment, so I’ll leave it at that for now, but I’ll be writing more as the project progresses and sharing photos along the way.

When is a star a star? An art-science collaboration

Ever since I started working with pattern, I’ve been interested in the maths behind what I do. I use a lot of numbers, sequences and grids to structure my work, experimenting with adding random elements or breaking rules that I have set myself. I find this a really satisfying way of working – the constraints and structure help me to organise and sort through the creative ideas and possibilities that sometimes seem overwhelming.

But I’ve always wanted to work with someone else’s numbers – what would happen if I applied my own way of working with number and pattern to the data from something else entirely?

A chat with the Lancashire Science Festival earlier this year was the perfect opportunity to start exploring this idea. After meeting several academics at the University of Central Lancashire who work with data in different ways – all of which left me with far too many ideas for projects before I’d even started – I was introduced to astrophysicist, Professor Derek Ward-Thompson, Director of the Jeremiah Horrocks Institute of Maths, Physics and Astronomy.

Derek’s research is all about star formation, which seemed like a perfect topic for a family event like the Lancashire Science Festival. I loved the idea of using art to communicate some of the facts and science behind something that seems so magical.

I have no background whatsoever in maths, physics or astronomy, which I later realised was a great place to start as all my ideas came directly from our discussions. After a crash course in star formation, helped by Derek’s patience with my extremely basic questions, I started to see where my own working process could fit in. Derek’s team works with telescopes that capture information on scales and distances that I can’t even comprehend, and the images they work with help to identify exactly what’s happening in space when stars are created.

Image credit: ESA/Herschel/PACS, SPIRE/N. Schneider, Ph. André, V. Könyves (CEA Saclay, France) for the 'Gould Belt survey' Key Programme

There are various elements that play a role in star formation: magnetic fields, filaments, cores and the stars themselves. These elements have formed the basis of my project and are the visual building blocks (what I usually call modules or motifs) that will appear throughout the series of prints that I’m producing. The images that I’m working from are all very different, so this visual system of identifying the key elements is helping me to create a cohesive body of work. I’ll save a write up of the work itself for another time though…

Collaborating in a cross-disciplinary way like this has been more inspiring, satisfying, exciting and productive than I had dared hope, and I’ve no doubt that it will inform my practice for a long time to come. Again, I’ll write more about this, and how I’m hoping to take it forward, once the dust has settled after the event.

I’ve been supported throughout this project by In Certain Places, as part of their Testing Ground programme, which helps artists to develop their ideas and connections into projects and potential funding applications. It’s reminded me how important it is to be a part of something and to be sharing ideas with and getting inspired by other people. It’s been a surprise to realise that art can be a bit of a lonely game without those connections in place. 

The results of the project will culminate in a solo exhibition in the PR1 Gallery in Preston from 28 June to 8 July, with a preview evening on 28 June 6–8pm. On Saturday 2 July, I’ll be producing a huge artwork on the floor of the gallery with visitors to the Lancashire Science Festival so people can experience some of the things I’ve learned about star formation for themselves. If you’re in the north west please come along to the festival and pop in to the gallery to take part! 

Mandala-making workshop at the Wellcome Collection

In January I ran a workshop at the Wellcome Collection as part of the Saturday Studio youth programme for 14–19 year olds. The workshop was linked to the Tibet’s Secret Temple exhibition which looked at Tibetan Buddhist yoga and meditation and how they link to physical and mental wellbeing. 

The workshop were run as drop-ins, and the young people who took part all made their own mandala designs based on pattern, shape and colour. On the day of the workshop Tibetan Buddhist monks were finishing a sand mandala as part of the exhibition, so we got to meet the monks and learn about their own approach to mandala making. 

I had an amazing day and was so impressed at all the different ideas people had for their mandalas. See a selection below... 

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