star dust, 2018
Shown at Queens Park Railway Club, as part of Artists who make music Musicians who make art: A curatorial project with Ross Sinclair. 2nd March to 25th March, 2018.
In November 2014 the European Space Agency's Rosetta Orbiter launched it's landing vehicle, Philae, to touch down on the comet known as 67p. Around this time I had been collecting mineral samples from the spoil heaps of the lead mines that surround my home. I was fascinated by their paradoxically unearthly beauty. It was a similar response that I had of the images being beamed back to the Rosetta Mission Control, in Darmstadt, from outer space.
There was something compelling about that relationship between these small samples of rock from deep within the bowels of our planet, which had never been destined to see the light of the Sun and reflect it back into our eyes, and these images of this huge, distended rock orbiting the Sun, whose countenance we were never intended to contemplate.
This is where this simple experiment began. Photographic portraits of the mineral samples, on an antique mirror were the first stage of this investigation. These can be seen here in the series entitled 'Cosmic Dust'. This was followed by taking closely-cropped video of the mirror being rotated. When this footage was slowed down an amiguity of provenance and scale is evoked. The resulting visuals, along with the ambient sounds of the recording dominated by my own music, which just happened to be being played in my studio at the time, created for me something that hovers somewhere between the unfathomable sublime, and the excruciating tedium of nothing happening to the irritating accompaniment of nerve jangling dissonance.