vestiges park - krisdyshindler.com

Artist’s Book2010

Vestiges Park

A L O W S A LT E x h i b i t i o n f o r G l a s g o w I n t e r n a t i o n a l F e s t i v a l o f Vi s u a l A r t 2 0 1 0

Front piece to the second edition of illustrations of the author of Waverley (1825), written by Robert Chambers taken from James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Ves-tiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago / London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000)

Eighteen forty-four would prove to be a significant year in the development of evolutionary thinking. That summer, a thirty-five year old geologist by the name of Charles Darwin completed an unpublished essay which would, in 230 pages, outline his theory of evolution by natural selection. Unbeknownst to the Victorian public, an intellectual revolu-tion was about to be unleashed, albeit fifteen years into the future. Instead, the middle-class public and the guardians of their intellectual development were all abuzz with discussion of an anonymously published work entitled ''Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation''. The story of this work, its author, and its reception remains one of the most intrigu-ing tales in the history of science. In it we can see foreshadows of many debates that still occur to this day – among scientists and public alike – including those about the validity of evolutionary theories, the demarcation of science from pseudoscience, and the effect of popularization upon scientific ideas. The publication of the first edition would see the birth of one of the greatest controversies of the nineteenth century, one that would result in the sale of over 23,000 copies over a sixteen year period and the publication of a further eleven editions (Secord 1994, xxvi )The work puts forward a cosmic theory of transmutation (which we now call evolution). It suggests that everything currently in existence has developed from earlier forms: solar system, Earth, rocks, plants and corals, fish, land plants, reptiles and birds, mammals, and ultimately man.The book begins by tackling the origins of the solar system, using the nebular hypothesis to explain its formations entirely in terms of natural law. It explains the origins of life by spontaneous generation, citing some questionable experiments that claimed to spontaneously generate insects through electricity. It then appeals to geology to demon-strate a progression in the fossil record from simple to more complex organisms, finally culminating in man—with the Caucasian European unabashedly identified as the pinnacle of this process, just above the other races and the rest of the animal kingdom.[2] From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The first edition of ''Vestiges'' appeared in mid-October 1844, with a print run of 150 copies. Candidates for the author-ship of the anonymous work were legion. Ada Lovelace, Harriet Martineau, Charles Lyell, Darwin, George Combe, Richard Owen, Charles Babbage, and even Prince Albert –

The book was published by the famed medical publisher John Churchill in London and great pains were undertaken to secure the secret of the authorship. To prevent the possibility of any unwanted revelations, Chambers only disclosed the secret to four people: his wife, his brother William, journalist Alexander Ireland, and George Combe’s nephew, Mr. Robert Cox. All correspondence to and from Chambers passed through Ireland’s hands first, and all letters and manu-scripts were dutifully transcribed in Mrs. Chambers’s hand.(1959) Milton Millhauser, Just Before Darwin: Robert Chambers and Vestiges, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press

It inspired violent criticism- Adam’s Sedgwick (Darwin’s geology professor) describing it as “philosophy out of moon-shine”, “so inaccurate, uninformed, contentious and unsupported by proven facts that it could have been written by a woman”.(from Darwin’s Origin of the species biography by Janet Browne)

Judd Brucke‘Serifs in Rust’

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MATERIALS: 1mm sheet metal, 10mm metal rods

“Such an arrangement of mutually adapted things was as likely to producesounds as an Eolian harp placed in a draught is to produce tones.”

[Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, ‘Early History of Mankind’, 3rd edition, 1844, pp. 295]doms’, 1st edition, 1844; James Secord, ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 191-235. ]

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[Brucke is a Toronto ex-pat relocated to Glasgow. After graphically testifying to the sounds of ‘Uncle John & Whitelock’ and ‘Sons and Daughters’ he began his explorations into large-scale set design painting and construction, lending his scratchy, dark-angular style to unique productions such as ‘The Secret Agent’; ‘Der Student von Prag’; and ‘ORZEL’. He solely works in black+white and would love to possess a WWI tank.]


ACD Ferguson‘Chambers Coliseum’

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MATERIALS: Fence design and construction


Acd Ferguson and Robbie Thomson are recent graduates of the Environmental Art Department at the Glasgow School of Art, working primarily with kinetic sculpture and installation. Their work centers around the use of found materials and the creation of immersive, experiential spaces such as the Rabbit Hole Gallery which they built beneath the floorboards of a city centre flat. Thomson and Ferguson are members of the 85A collective who recently produced the acclaimed Orzel film performance, have worked in close association with Lowsalt Gallery and have exhibited at venues including the CCA, Death Disco at the Arches and National Theatre of Scotland’s Allotment.


Andrew Sunley Smith‘1637 / 1803 / 1818 / 1844 / 1859 / 1862 / 1870 / 1890 / 1931 / 1954 / 1970 / 1998 / 2010’

1637 Descartes / 1803 Galvini / 1818 Shelley / 1844 Chambers / 1859 Darwin / 1862 Merrick B / 1870 Verne /1890 Merrick D / 1931 Karloff / 1954 Disney 20,000/ 1970 Corona, / 1998 Gossamer / 2010 Present

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MATERIALS:Industrial 2.5 tonne gantry, welded mild steel, gloss epoxy enamel, hand made forged brackets, U bolts, chain,

12,000 3mm Led Lights, Integrated electronic circuits, fibre Glass, Perspex, rubber, silicone, 240v and 12v electricity

An Industrial Gallows – An Epitaph for our pollution

Omnipresent is our drain,Vast and unstoppable we spread, a hanging for energies reaped, an evolution draining.

Creating and exhaustingA fascinating beauty

Horrific in destruction.Inexorably, the spectacle of our demise.

The subtle beating… gradually asphyxiating pulse of human kind.

This work is conceived as a fusion, linking through points in time, a centering of references, an evolution of Robert Chambers notions of auto-generating life forms from light, the scientific flow of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the experimental work of Luigi Galvini and Victorian voyages of discovery and the cinematic grand

narratives which, pervade, entertain and continue to thread through our culture. A work for ‘horror’, an iconic silhouette..

- “As its always good, artistically to know, and explore all that scares people; To study our anxieties in all forms and the ways these fears manifest ”. - For the films I grew up on, the novels and comics I read. For the atmospheres that tempered my morals and structured a portion of my Aesthetics

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Sunley-Smith was born in 1969, North Yorkshire, England and moved to Australia in 1989. He is an independent and internationally exhibiting artist. His exhibitions have included Reality 10.55, Odense, at Kunsthalle Brandts Denmark, (with Martin Creed and Alicia Framis). Migratory Projects, Centre for Contemporary art Glasgow, The Drive out Cinema, Perth Institute for Contemporary art, Western Australia. New Acquisitions, Museum of Contemporary art Sydney, Australia, Room with a View, Kunsthalle Mainz. Migratory Projects, New Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney. The Nocturnal Tourist, Leica documentary photography award. Do-It, Perth International Festival: Jimmie Durham Instruction, Western Australia. Chiasm, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. His work is held in the national collection of the Museum of Contemporary art, Sydney Australia where he lived and worked for many years until returning to the UK to live and work in Glasgow in late 2007. He has also lectured at the Bauhaus Universitat Weimar, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow University and Oxford Brookes University recently.


Please see further reading provided at the end of this bookklet.

Alex GrossPilzexperimentalar chitektur

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MATERIALS:Shitake and Lion-mane fungi spores, metal, swamp

“Mushrooms, we know, can be propagated by their seed; but another mode of raising them, well known to the gardener, is to mix cow and horse dung together, and thus form a bed in which they are expected to grow without any seed being planted. It is assumed that the seeds are carried by the atmosphere, unperceived by us, finding here an appropriote field for germina-

tion, germinate accordingly; but this is only assumption, and though designed to be on the side of a severe philosophy, in reality makes a pretty large demand on credulity. There are several persons eminent in science who profess at least to find

great difficulties in accepting the doctrine of invariable generation.”

[ Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,chapter 13 ‘Particular Considerations respecting the Origin of the Animated Tribes’ 1st edition, 1844; In James Secord, ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 165-190. ]

‘If there is something like an ongoing evolution in Architecture this mushroom building will need a very strange Island to exist.There is too much control and too much perfection in architecture. I want a rebelling landscape architecture; one that approves rotten trees, stinking ponds with dead fish, filth and mushrooms from the beginning on. For me some posh ultramodern family homes only start feeling alive when there is mouldy water underneath the sink and black mushrooms on the bathrooms wallpaper. Those natural incidents are so human and full of poetry. What the archi-

tecture tries to exclude grows even wilder.

The family arrives at home and enters the house along the slippery ramp of rotten brown mushrooms into the warmth of the living room’ - Alex Gross

We b s i t e : w w w. a r t n e w s . o r g / a l e x g r o s s o r w w w. t r a n s m i s s i o n g a l l e r y. o r g / m e m b e r s /

Within his recent projects Alex Gross constructs architectural situations that encourage the spectator to create his own space of experience by ac-tively engaging with the site. A simple physical action is connected with a complex spatial situation. The visitor is not forced to react in a certain way but rather is the situation so unresolved that it cant be understood by just being passive. It is not about the result of the action that is being tak-en but about the narration that is created within the action of anticipating space and the question how certain spatial parameters create action.

Alex Gross finished his MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2006. At the moment he is based in Glasgow and Berlin. He has shown his sculptures and temporal installations internationally.


Phill LeeInsular Vestiges - ‘Derive Nostalgic from Nostalgic Derivatives’

Off shoots of earthly beginnings concur and combust with post-currentprediction, romantic notions and bestial under currents.

&Exterior Vestiges - ‘God left a long time ago…’

The remnants of evolution keep mounting.w


MATERIALS: Soundscape

“an increase in the number and extent of the manifestations of life, or of the relations which an organized being bears to the external world”

[ Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, chapter 14 ‘Hypothesis of the Development of the Vegetable and Animal King-doms’, 1st edition, 1844; James Secord, ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 191-235. ]

Sound Designer and Sonic ArtistUnnerving aural oddities, galloping ear-ences, anti-shouting.


Shelly Nadashi‘All About Money / Gertrud Stein / read by Shelly Nadashi.’

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MATERIALS: Sound

“It has been one of the most agreeable tasks of modern science to trace the wonderfully exact adaptations of the organization of animals to the physical circumstances amidst which they are destined to live”

[ Robert Chambers.Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, chapter 17 ‘, Mental Constitution of Animals’ 1st edition, 1844, pp. 324-360. ]

In which physical circumstances was I destined to live?, I recorder myself reading All About Money.

Gertrude Stein died in France in 1946 at the age of seventy-two. She had become one of the century’s most publicized but least read authors and she had influenced three generations of writers, including Hemingway and Thornton Wilder

Gertrud Stein never earned any money from her writing until she was almost sixty years old, when the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published in America and became best seller. In her book Everybody’s Autobiography she wrote: ‘I had never made any money before in my life and I was most excited. When I was a child I used to be fascinated with the stories of how everybody had earned their first dollar. I always wanted to have earned my first dollar and now I have. We were all amused during the war there was an American over here and he once said he had just made five hundred thousand dollars and he added al honestly earned. I have been writing a lot about money lately, it is a fascinating subject, it is really the

difference between men and animal, most of the things men feel animals feel and vice versa, but animal do not know about money, money is purely a human conception and that is very important to know very very important… Anyway, the Saturday Evening Post printed the little articles I wrote about money then and the young ones said I was reactionary and they said how could I be I who had always been so well ahead of every one and I

myself was not and am not certain that I am not again well ahead as ahead as I ever have been,’

These short articles were written in 1936 and printed in the Saturday Evening Post between June and October of that year.

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[Born in 1981 in Haifa, Shelly is a visual artist based in Glasgow. She graduated from The School for Visual Theatre in Jerusalem and recently finished her MFA degree at the Glasgow School of Art. Shelly’s activity is multi-disciplinary, ranging from video making to live performances, from sound design to puppetry and text. Fun, play, pleasure and humour are some of the strongest driving forces behind her activities, they form her general attitude towards artistic creation and help to carry out the mixture between the autobiographical and the surreal, which is characteristic to her artistic work.]

Shelly has exhibited internationally including at The Jerusalem Artist’s House, Embassy Gallery, Collective Gallery, Plateaux Festival Frankfurt, the Magdeburg puppetry festival and Arches Live Festival. Her video works were selected for Ramat Hasharon Biannual for young Israeli artists in 2008 and for the Gstaad film festival in 2010.


Rob Mulholland‘ reflectivetransmutation ‘

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MATERIALS: Mirrored Perspex, steel

“ One of the first and simplest functions of mind is to give consciousness—consciousness of our identity and of our existence. This, apparently, is independent of the senses, which are simply media, and, as Locke has shown, the only media, through

which ideas respecting the external world reach the brain. The access of such ideas to the brain is the act to which the meta-physicians have given the name of perception. Gall, however, has shown, by induction from a vast number of actual cases, that there is a part of the brain devoted to perception, and that even this is sub-divided into portions which are respectively

dedicated to the reception of different sets of ideas, as those of form, size, colour, weight, objects in their totality “

[ Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, chapter 17 ‘mental constitution of animals’ 1st edition, 1844, pp. 324-360. ]

“I am also interested in the theories of Jean Baptiste Lamarch who proposed in his Philosophie Zoologique (1809) a theory of the transmutation of species. Lamarck did not believe that all living things shared a common singular ancestor. In his theory he believed

that life forms were created continuously by adaptation to their environment and requirements to survive. I like the idea that the figures are a progressive evolution of how we might interact with our future environment. They also reflect the image of us looking at them.

I’m interested in this from the aspect of viewing art forms, fundamentally awakening our thoughts on how we see the world around us and how we as individuals interact with human society and the broadernatural cycle of life” - Rob Mullholand

We b s i t e : w w w. r o b m u l h o l l a n d . c o . u k

Rob was born in Glasgow and studied sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 1987. As a member of the newly formed Edinburgh Sculpture Studios he continued his studio based work with his first solo exhibition in 1989 at the 369 Gallery in Edin-burgh. In 1990 Rob movedback to Glasgow and started to develop several public art projects including a 300ft long sculpture made from re-cycled aluminium cans which was constructed on Glasgow green as part of the Glasgow Festival. Rob has continued to de-velop studio based works and engage in public art projects and received an award from The Scottish Arts Council in 2008 to develop his practise. He has exhibited widely throughout the U.K. and abroad. He is currently commissioned to create four 3mtr high stain-less steel mirrored figures for the regeneration of Alloa town centre.


Clara Ursitti1. The Museum of Gloves

2. Five + One(Intervention)

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MATERIALS: Antique and hand made/altered gloves by the artist, mixed media, scent

‘Early in the last century, a man named Lambert, was born in Suffolk, with semi-horny excrescences of about half an inch long, thickly growing all over his body. The peculiarity was transmitted to his children, and was last heard of in a third generation. The peculiarity of six fingers on the hand and six toes on the feet, appears in like manner in families which

have no record or tradition of such a peculiarity having affected them at any former period, and it is then sometimes seen to descend through several generations. It was Mr. Lawrence’s opinion, that a pair, in which both parties were so distinguished, might be the progenitors of a new variety of the race who would be thus marked in all future time. It is not easy to surmise the causes which operate in producing such varieties. Perhaps they are simply types in nature, possible to be realized under

certain appropriate conditions, but which conditions are such as altogether to elude notice.’[ Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, chapter 16 ‘Early History of Mankind’ 1st edition, 1844 ]

“Both Robert and William were born with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. Their parents attempted to correct this abnormality through operations, and while William’s was successful Robert was left partially lame. So while

other boys roughed it outside, Robert was content to stay indoors and study his books.[5] “[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Chambers]

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[Clara Ursitti has been working with fragrance since the early 1990s creating pungent installations that delve into the social and psycho-logical aspects of scent. She is interested in non-verbal (chemical) communication, the non-visual senses, speculative fiction and memory. She has an experimental and eclectic practice that can be challenging to document in images as it is reliant on the experiential, the way something feels.]

Clara Ursitti is currently the recipient of the Scottish Arts Council Artist Award and has exhibited widely including in the Gothenburg Biennale, Sweden; ICA, London; CCA Glasgow; YYZ, Toronto; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Montevideo: The Netherlands Media Institute, Amsterdam; Living Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland. In 2004 she was a recipient of the IASPIS (Interna-tional Artists Studio Programme in Sweden) award and in 2006-2007 she was the Arts Council of England Helen Chadwick Fellow (British School at Rome and University of Oxford ) She is originally from Canada, and presently based in Glasgow, Scotland.

Thanks to Maxillofacial Unit, Southern General Hospital, Graham Ramsay, Danny Holcroft


Jonathan Scott‘TO ALL OUR’

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MATERIALS:Palisade Fencing and paint, dimensions 280cm x 280cm

“The sub-typical circles do not comprise the largest individuals in bulk, but always those which are the most powerfully armed, either for inflicting injury on their own class, for exciting terror, producing injury,

or creating annoyance to man.”

[Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, chapter 15 ‘Macleay System of Animated Nature. This System Considered in Con-nexion with the Progress of Organic Creation, and as Indicating the Natural Status of Man’, 1st edition, 1844 ]

We b s i t e : w w w. j o n a t h a n s c o t t . i n fo

[My artistic practice is primarily split between drawing and sculpture, and usually manifests itself in the com-bination of the two elements within large-scale installations and self-contained sculptural works. The recurring concept is one of an antagonistic society from which varying moments are punctuated in physical form. From observations of urban (social and political) structures, my practice seeks to re-contextualise specific forms cou-pling them with their latent emotional value]


Ben Dembroski‘Symets # 1-3’

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MATERIALS: lead, assorted solid-state electronic components, crystal goblets

“So that all animated nature may be said to be based on this mode of origin; the fundamental form of organic being is a globule, having a new globule forming within itself, by which it is in time discharged, and which is again followed by

another and another, in endless succession. It is of course obvious that, if these globules could be produced by any process from inorganic elements, we should be entitled to say that the fact of a transit from the inorganic into the organic had been witnessed in that instance ; the possibility of the commencement of animated creation by the ordinary laws of nature might be considered as established. Now it was announced some years ago by the French physiologists Prevost and Dumas, that globules could be produced in albumen by electricity. If, therefore, these globules be identical with the cells which are now held to be reproductive, it might be said that the production of albumen by artificial means is the only step in the process wanting. This has not yet been effected; but it is known to be only a chemical process, the mode of which may be any day

discovered in the laboratory.*

*The reader will please to understand that the above paragraph is only an humble attempt to bring illustration from a department of science on which at present much doubt and obscurity rest. I have followed the best lights I could find, but cannot be assured that better will not yet be evolved from the researches of the many able physiologists now engaged in the investigation of ultimate structure and of embryology. I am bound to admit, in the meantime, that the identity of the glob-

ules produced in albumen by electricity with living cells, and the fact of the reproduction of living globules...”

[ Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, chapter 13 ‘Particular Considerations respecting the Origin of the Animated Tribes’, 1st edition, 1844, , pp. 165-190. ]

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[Ben Dembroski is an American born artist who settled in Glasgow after completing his MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2004. He’s mostly interested in investigating the how to best exploit the economies of the digital without sacrificing his love of the sculp-tural object. He’s an active member of the Electron Club and OpenLab-Glasgow, and is always interested in talking to people who do wonderful and strange things with electrons. These days he spends most of his time either in front of a computer making things go “beep” or with soldering iron in his hand making things go “bang!”. Do not let him touch your computer, as he will most likely break it.]


Jen SykesThe Oolite Sisterhood

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MATERIALS:Diagrams, Data, Pocket Reference, Labcoat, Analytical Graph Machine.

“—the oolite—a limestone composed of an aggregation of small round grains or spherules, and so called from its fancied resemblance to a cluster of eggs, or the roe of a fish. This texture of stone is novel and striking.

It is supposed to be of chemical origin, each spherule being an aggregation of particles round a central nucleus”

[ Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, chapter 8, ‘Era of the Oolite. Commencement of Mammalia’, 1st edition, 1844;, pp. 105-115. ]

‘During the early adulthood of Lady Ada Lovelace, a fortuitous encounter with the great publishing sensation of the day, ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’, altered her approach to research forever. Curious and inspired, Lovelace was to take the hypotheses elucidated in Vestiges and seek to corroborate them in full. It has been claimed Lovelace was, in fact, the author of Vestiges, but un-beknownst to her she had experience of the true author, Robert Chambers*, in a brief but passionate exchange of letters some year’s

prior. Perhaps this charged encounter had fuelled Lady Ada’s thirst for knowledge in the first instance? One can but speculate…

Through ingeniously reasoned scientific experimentation and rigorous mathematickal research a methodology was forged and reforged. These techniques have now been practiced by generations of our brethren, known collectively as The Oolite Sisterhood,

which exists only to further educate the masses on the subject of Natural Philosophy. Their prophetic utterances are internationally renowned, seeking as they do to map fresh data and open up Terra Nullius to The Searching Eye of Science!

*It has been further suggested that Chambers and Lovelace were in fact one and the same and an early instance of so-called ‘trans-genderism’. If this was indeed the case perhaps it served to enable she/he to glide betwixt mutually incompatible worlds somewhat in

the manner of the shape-shifter.’

We b s i t e : w w w. p i d j e n s y k e s . b l o g s p o t . c o m

Born in 1986 in West Yorkshire, Jen Sykes recently graduated from the Environmental Art department at Glas-gow School of Art. She continues to live and work in Glasgow.


Jack Wrigley‘Turning Tables’

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MATERIALS: Mixed media

One impulse from a vernal woodMay teach you more of man,Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous form of things:We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;Close up those barren leaves;

Come forth, and bring with you a heartThat watches and receives

[ (William Wordsworth – The Tables Turned ) ]

Vestiges was a hybrid

“Science had made great acquisitions, and it seemed desirable, if only for experiments sake, to see what kind of Frankenstein would result from the architectural union of her scattered limbs.” (Atlas, 20th December 1845)


Jack Wrigley lives and works in Glasgow.


Zuzanna Kalinowska‘Alphos Agnus Scythicus’

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MATERIALS: Mixed

Hypothesis of the Development of the Vegetable and Animal Kingdoms.

“It has been already intimated, as a general fact, that there is an obvious gradation amongst the families of both the veg-etable and animal kingdoms, from the simple lichen and animalcule respectively up to the highest order of dicotyledonous

trees and the mammalia”[ Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 1st edition, 1844 pp ]

Chambers heard of a marvelous plant animal from the countries of western Asia or Eastern Europe. He went in search of the elusive Agnus Scythicus.

Chambers found and dissected the animal in 1837. He discovered it had blood, bones, and flesh like that of a normal lamb. In his field notes he wrote it was connected to the earth by a stem similar to that of a human umbilical cord but with the strength of metal when erect. Though he states “while trying to capture the beast I severed its stem with my foot by the time I was able to restrain it the stem had quickly shrived up”. The seed is like that of a melon, but the plant grows to the height of three feet. They mostly breed in the autumn. Its wool was said to be used by the native people of its homeland to make head coverings and other articles of clothing.

In a resent article the plant has been shown to contain potential treatment for Osteoporosis. Scientists have found substances in the sheep that show promise in laboratory experiments as new treatments for osteoporosis, the bone-thinning disease. That’s the conclu-

sion of a new study in ACS’ monthly Journal of Natural Products.

Specimen on loan from the Chamber Preservation Society


Zuzanna Kalinowska is an artist based in Glasgow


Cheryl Field1. Where There Is Light There Will Be Eyes

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MATERIALS:1. Steel, Acrylic, Motor, Electrical Components

2. Aluminium, Steel, Motor, Electrical Components

“Electricity we also see to be universal; if, therefore, it be a principle concerned in life and in mental action, as science strongly suggests, life and mental action must everywhere be of one general character. We come to comparatively a matter

of detail, when we advert to heat and light; yet it is important to consider that these are universal agents, and that, as they bear marked relations to organic life and structure on earth, they may be presumed to do so in other spheres also. The con-siderations as to light are particularly interesting, for, on our globe, the structure of one important organ, almost universally distributed in the animal kingdom, is in direct and precise relation to it; where there is light there will be eyes, and these, in

other spheres, will be the same in all respects as the eyes of tellurian animals.’ [ (Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Chapter 12 ‘General Considerations respecting the Origin of the Animated

Tribes’, pp. 145-164.) ]

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[At the heart of my work lies a fascination with the relationship between evolution and aesthetics. Our human physiology, neurology and psychology have evolved over millennia and many of the physical systems we employ today still resonate with our biological past. It is these resonances, and their ubiquity, that provide the matter I use to play, manipulate and make manifest in my work. In par-ticular I’m intrigued by our exquisite sensitivity to movement within our environment - this makes movement an ideal metaphorical language; a vocabulary and grammar with which we are all well versed and which has the potential to tell us something fundamental about our perception and experience of the world]

Cheryl Field graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2007, she continues to live and work in Glasgow, creating wobbling, spin-ning and twitching oddities. Recent solo exhibitions include: Phylum & Genus at Market Gallery, Glasgow and ontology | a at The Southside Gallery, Glasgow. Cheryl is a recipient of a Royal Academy of Scotland residency and bursary, which she will be spending, mainly fending off midges, at Taigh Chearsabhagh in North Uist during Summer 2010.


Jim Colquhoun‘Fox (kitsunetsuki)’

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MATERIALS: wood, paint, paper, wire, sound

“That enjoyment is the proper attendant of animal existence is pressed upon us by all that we see and all we experience. Everywhere we perceive in the lower creatures, in their ordinary condition, symptoms of enjoyment. Their whole being is

a system of needs, the supplying of which is gratification, and of faculties, the exercise of which is pleasurable. When we con-sult our own sensations, we find that, even in a sense of a healthy performance of all the functions of the animal economy,

God has furnished us with an innocent and very high enjoyment.” [Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Chapter 18 ‘Purpose and General Condition of the Animated Creation’1st edition,

1844, pp. 361-386. ]

[My work unfolds around an engagement with place and space and the subsequent experiences and research this engenders. This means engaging with a particular place both literally and figuratively, but it is also often an attempt to deconstruct the common per-ception of history as a linear narrative form. I view these activities as a form of divination, wherein I try to filter a particular place through the lens of my own subjectivity. I am drawn Instinctively to the margins, whether they be cultural, political, psychological, social or spatial and I very much want to blur the boundaries between art and life, fiction and fact, history and myth. The work exhibits a kind of skewed and ironic romanticism – the solitary walker, autodidacticism, hermeticism, religious and occult motifs, exoticism are all bound up together and coarsened by being shoved into close proximity with popular culture, often in the form of pulp fiction, para-political speculation and dubious folklores of one kind or another]

Jim Colquhoun is an artist and writer based in Glasgow. His work seeks to negotiate the boundaries between art and life, waking and dreaming, fiction and fact. To this end he produces drawings, installations, performances and texts. He has shown recently in Edinburgh, Copenhagen, New York, Akureyri and Glasgow.

Thanks to Kerry Musselbrook, Una H Colquhoun, Leigh French, Becky and Dav


Robbie Thomson‘Deer -dog Donkey- dickfrog ranuculus erectus’

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MATERIALS: Mixed

‘...electricity is almost as metaphysical as ever mind was supposed to be. It is a thing perfectly intangible, weightless.’

[ Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, chapter 17 ‘Mental Constitution of Animals’ 1st edition, 1844; Reprinted in James Secord, ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 324-360. ]


[Thomson and Ferguson are recent graduates of the Environmental Art Department at the Glasgow School of Art, working primarily with kinetic sculpture and installation. Their work centers around the use of found materials and the creation of immersive, experiential spaces such as the Rabbit Hole Gallery which he built beneath the floorboards of a city centre flat. Thomson and ACD Ferguson are members of the 85A collective who recently produced the acclaimed Orzel film performance, have worked in close association with Lowsalt Gallery and have exhibited at venues including the CCA, Death Disco at the Arches and National Theatre of Scotland’s Allotment.]


Andrew Sunley Smith‘1637 / 1803 / 1818 / 1844 / 1859 / 1862 / 1870 / 1890 / 1931 / 1954 / 1970 / 1998 / 2010 1’ 1637 Descartes / 1803 Galvini / 1818 Shelley / 1844 Chambers / 1859 Darwin / 1862 Merrick B / 1870 Verne /1890 Merrick D / 1931 Karloff / 1954 Disney 20,000/

1970 Corona, / 1998 Gossamer / 2010 Presentw


Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. 2

In the mundane economy, mental action takes its place as a means of providing for the independent existence and the various relations of animals, each species being furnished according to its special necessities and the demands of its various relations.

The ‘nervous system’—the more comprehensive term for its organic apparatus—is variously developed in different classes and species, and also in different individuals, the volume or mass bearing a general relation to the amount of power.

In the mollusca and crustacea we see simply a ganglionic cord pervading the extent of the body, and sending out lateral filaments. In the vertebrata, we find a brain with a spinal cord, and branching lines of nervous tissue. But here, as in the general structure of ani-

mals, the great principle of unity is observed. The brain of the vertebrata is merely an expansion of one of the ganglions of the nervous cord of the mollusca and crustacea. Or the corresponding ganglion of the mollusca and crustacea may be regarded as the rudiment of a

brain; the superior organ thus appearing as only a farther development of the inferior.

There are many facts which tend to prove that the action of this apparatus is of an ‘electric’ nature, a modification of that surprising agent, which takes magnetism, heat, and ‘light’, as other subordinate forms, and of whose general scope in this great system of things

we are only beginning to have a right conception.

It has been found that simple electricity, artificially produced, and sent along the nerves of a dead body, excites muscular action (Gal-vini). 3

The brain of a newly-killed animal being taken out and replaced by a substance which produces electric action, can induce the opera-tion of digestion, which had been interrupted by the death of the animal, was resumed, showing the absolute identity of the brain with a galvanic battery.

Nor is this a very startling idea, when we reflect that electricity is almost as metaphysical as ever mind was supposed to be.

It is a thing perfectly intangible, weightless. Metal may be magnetized, or heated to seven hundred of Fahrenheit, without becoming the hundredth part of a grain heavier. And yet electricity is a real thing, an actual existence in nature, as witness the effects of heat and light


Galivini Frogs legs: Experimentation 1803

We b s i t e : w w w. s u n l e y s m i t h . c o madadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadada


in vegetation, the power of the galvanic current to re-assemble the particles of copper from a solution, and make them again into a solid plate—the rending force of the thunderbolt as it strikes the oak; see also how both heat and light observe the angle of incidence in reflection, as exactly as does the grossest stone thrown obliquely against a wall.

So mental action may be imponderable, intangible, and yet a real existence, and ruled by the Eternal through his laws.

Stellar evolution, Adaptation, EntropyStellar evolution is the process by which a star undergoes a sequence of radical changes during its lifetime. Depending on the mass of the star, this lifetime ranges from only a few million years (for the most massive) to trillions of years (for the smaller),

Stellar evolution is not studied by observing the life of a single star, as most stellar changes occur too slowly to be detected, (over many centuries). Instead, astrophysicists come to understand how stars evolve by observing numerous stars at the various points in their life

In Stars, eventually, as they burn and mature, the core exhausts its supply of hydrogen, and without the outward pressure generated by the fusion of hydrogen to counteract the constant gravitational force, it contracts until either electron degeneracy becomes suf-ficient to oppose gravity or the core becomes increasingly hot enough for helium fusion to begin.

Inexorably sustaining, consuming, stars eventually destroy themselves.

Coronial loops: 1637 -2010

Work produced from science, lives and arcs its transience in romance.

The ones that strove, leapt, lived and talked, breathed and burned..

..For the dead, for the distanced, for the gone.

With light, pulsing now, the very stuff with which we harness and traverse distances. In fiber optics channeled, voices encoded, recorded, sent, decoded and received.

You were in life, as in death.. for a brief moment …light, just light. Of what is proven we know and have felt.

A light goes out… it has burned, consumed.

Evolutions / Cogito ergo sum

Trans: I THINK therefore I am….If so, then what of feeling?

Corrections / Adaptations… I FEEL therefore I am, (Durham via Spinoza)

As Shelley also explored in the creation and articulation of her tortured, alienated, intelligent master character Frankenstein’s Mon-ster.

Still found best on the pages.. Cinema has done no favors.

Coronial loops:

Corona in Astronomy: a type of plasma atmosphere, hotter than the surface of the sun.The luminous irregular surging envelope of highly ionized gas outside the chromosphere of the sun.The luminescence surrounding a celestial body visible through a haze or thin cloud, especially such a ring around the moon or sun, caused by diffraction of light from suspended matter in the intervening medium. Also called aureole.

In electricity it is a discharge, an emission of light or sound, Corona’s are traced as leaks of power, surges that seek to bridge gaps sur-rounding high voltages or extreme temperatures Coronas glow enveloping higher-field electrodes in a corona discharge, often accompanied by streamers and arcs directed toward the



in vegetation, the power of the galvanic current to re-assemble the particles of copper from a solution, and make them again into a solid plate—the rending force of the thunderbolt as it strikes the oak; see also how both heat and light observe the angle of incidence in reflection, as exactly as does the grossest stone thrown obliquely against a wall.

So mental action may be imponderable, intangible, and yet a real existence, and ruled by the Eternal through his laws. 4

Stellar evolution, Adaptation, EntropyStellar evolution is the process by which a star undergoes a sequence of radical changes during its lifetime. Depending on the mass of the star, this lifetime ranges from only a few million years (for the most massive) to trillions of years (for the smaller),

Stellar evolution is not studied by observing the life of a single star, as most stellar changes occur too slowly to be detected, (over many centuries). Instead, astrophysicists come to understand how stars evolve by observing numerous stars at the various points in their life

In Stars, eventually, as they burn and mature, the core exhausts its supply of hydrogen, and without the outward pressure generated by the fusion of hydrogen to counteract the constant gravitational force, it contracts until either electron degeneracy becomes suf-ficient to oppose gravity or the core becomes increasingly hot enough for helium fusion to begin.

Inexorably sustaining, consuming, stars eventually destroy themselves.

Coronial loops: 1637 -2010

Work produced from science, lives and arcs its transience in romance.

The ones that strove, leapt, lived and talked, breathed and burned..

..For the dead, for the distanced, for the gone.

With light, pulsing now, the very stuff with which we harness and traverse distances. In fiber optics channeled, voices encoded, recorded, sent, decoded and received.

You were in life, as in death.. for a brief moment …light, just light. Of what is proven we know and have felt.

A light goes out… it has burned, consumed.

Evolutions / Cogito ergo sum 5

Trans: I THINK therefore I am….If so, then what of feeling?

Corrections / Adaptations… I FEEL therefore I am, (Durham via Spinoza)

As Shelley also explored in the creation and articulation of her tortured, alienated, intelligent master character Frankenstein’s Mon-ster. 6

Still found best on the pages.. Cinema has done no favors.

Coronial loops:

Corona in Astronomy: a type of plasma atmosphere, hotter than the surface of the sun. The luminous irregular surging envelope of highly ionized gas outside the chromosphere of the sun.

The luminescence surrounding a celestial body visible through a haze or thin cloud, especially such a ring around the moon or sun, caused by diffraction of light from suspended matter in the intervening medium. Also called aureole.

In electricity it is a discharge, an emission of light or sound, Corona’s are traced as leaks of power, surges that seek to bridge gaps surrounding high voltages or extreme temperatures Coronas glow enveloping higher-field electrodes in a corona discharge, often ac-companied by streamers and arcs directed toward the lower-field electrode in the surrounding vicinity. glows and cracks and hissings are those, which accompany lightening strokes.

These Coronial arcs, the glows and cracks and hissings are those, which accompany lightening strokes.

Perhaps our fate, as the brightness and diversity of our planet dwindles and chokes is to watch, besotted, fascinated by the lightshow that we have created. As the lights beam, as the electricity pulses… it exhausts and burns all around it, the final stages of a star, an ephemeral entropy caused by the will and consumption of this force to survive, consuming all that is made from and all that is around it.


Cats Eye Nebula formed by the Death of a Star of the Same mass as the Sun (Stock image, Wiki)

Coronial Transient Loops (St ock Image)

1. 1637 Descartes / 1803 Galvini / 1818 Shelley / 1844 Chambers / 1859 Darwin / 1862 Merrick B / 1870 Verne /1890 Merrick D / 1931 Karloff / 1954 Disney 20,000/ 1970 Corona, / 1998 Gossamer / 2010 Present

2. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, A Modern Prometheus 1818 – abridged/evolved by artist 2010.

3. Luigi Galvini 1803, Galvinism

4. If mental action is electric, the proverbial quickness of thought—that is, the quickness of the transmission of sensation and will/may be presumed to have been brought to an exact measurement. The speed of light has long been known to be about 192,000 miles per second, and the experiments of Wheatstone have shown that the electric agent travels (if I may so speak) at the same rate, thus showing a likelihood that one law rules the movements of all the “imponderable bodies.” Mental action may accordingly be presumed to have a rapidity equal to one hundred and ninety-two thousand miles in the second—a rate evidently far beyond what is necessary to make the design and execution of any of our ordinary muscular movements apparently identical in point of time, which they are.

5. Rene Descartes, Discourse on the method and principles of Philosophy 1637

6. James Whales and Boris Karloffs stupid hokey 1931 mistake, Universal Pictures – Spawned a cult of misrepresentation defacing the truth and sensibility of the figure, poise and intelligence of the perceived Monster.


vestiges park - krisdyshindler.com

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