A reference to an historical navigation method.  Starting from a place of certainty by calculating a previously determined position and then advancing that position with the use of instruments and analysis. The process of dead reckoning allows the navigator to know where they are in a featureless ocean.  However, sometimes ships are knocked off course by un-foreseen natural events and are lost.
The sculptural installation uses steel balloons suspended mid air by the force of magnetism.

Dead Reckoning

Whilst making this I was thinking of the usual cliches around the circularity and symbolism of money and the grip this force has on our lives.  The poverty trap and its debilitating influence.  I’m also thinking of the Crown of Thorns and the symbolism of that historical torture held in place by 12 spokes.  It was serendipitous that the lowest coin denominations are magnetic and form the crown.  Each coin also wears a crown reinforcing the power of monarchy and privilege.  A wooden ‘cart’ wheel is pegged together in traditional fashion into the rim to replace the rubber tyre.

Crown

Using a lodestone compass this work explores the phenomenon of electromagnetism making reference to recent scientific discoveries in geo-magnetism and magneto-reception. 

Its premise hinges on the fact that animals are connected to the earth in a fundamental way that humans are not.  Recent science has revealed that animals have a sense that allows them to detect the earth’s magnetic field whereas humans do not possess this ability.  The human species has literally lost its sense of direction.

This is therefore the grand metaphor of the work – we have lost our sense of direction.  Using a powerful magnet and series of compasses, a distorted anthropocentic power relationship is established to amplify humanity’s dominance over the natural world and our inherent shame. The invisibility of this power, the magnetic field, stands to remind us of the fact that we don’t see the enormity of the damage being done.  What many are now calling the sixth great extinction. The work has layered content but at its heart is climate change, species extinction and humanity’s culpability in this process. 

Named after The Tempest Prognosticator by George Merryweather in 1851 this work is about the silence before the storm, the increasing  rapidity of species extinction, in all habitats across the earth.

The Tempest Prognosticator

This is a clockwork kinetic sculpture which explores the spaces between the waves where we invent notions of time.

According to quantum physics a particle exists as a wave throughout the universe but when it is observed and enters our consciousness it becomes a measurable particle, with the aid of scientific instruments, this is known as ‘wave function collapse’. A wave is converted by our mind from a probability to something with structure and locality. Therefore consciousness plays a fundamental part in the structure of the universe, it implies that the universe can only exist, or come into being, if it is observed. This kinetic sculpture is less an illustration but more a meditation on the fact.

Brain Melt (the wave function collapse)

It could be described as a cuckoo clock which chimes on the hour. But it's more than that, like all creatures of the earth the Common Cuckoo population is in decline due to the use of insecticides and habitat loss. In the period of coronavirus and lockdown ‘Going Cuckoo’ seems to me an extension of this dystopian madness, like an imagined nostalgia of life lost, my hope is that wildlife globally can begin to recover whilst we are locked away. 

Going Cuckoo

This piece is about the humanities influence on nature.  A central mechanical figure is set in motion by the turning of the automata handle, the figure holds a magnet up to  the compasses as it revolves.  The compasses rest on top of towers which have an image of an endangered animal on the IUCN* red list for Europe in 2020.  Human's don't have the ability to sense the earth's magnetic field but science has demonstrated that most other animals do, they have a connection to the earth that we have lost.  This is a visual metaphor for man’s destabilising influence on nature.

* ICUN : International Union for the Conservation of Nature

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richard paton