| Trace Paintings, acrylic on canvas, April 08. It was my original intention to keep the canvases produced by the pendulum installation performances in just a few, large pieces which would document the progression of each performance. These would have been between two and five meters long. However, due to the constraints of storage and transport, and the interest shown in smaller sections, I have started to break them down and select elements from them to frame. For sale.
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| Giving Voice to the Wind, / A Tinntinabulation of Cosmic Scintillation. Collaboration between Suzie Shrubb & Ben Martin. Brackelsham Bay beach, 9th June 2008. An experiment for a future music/performance durational installation. Large glass bottles are placed on the beach at an angle to the prevailing wind. When the conditions are right they produce gentle, organ-like tones. Each group of bottles is tuned to a pitch which is taken from one of the pulsars in the globular cluster Tucana 47.
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| Previous works, various. 2004-6
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| Galileo’s Lamp, Performance installation. Hotham Art Centre 5th August 2007. Third performance. By far the largest audience. An opportunity to perform with the previous two canvases hanging behind me. A very positive reception, with many people commenting on the apparent resemblance to representations of sound waves.
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| Galileo’s Lamp, Performance installation. Hotham Art Centre 4th August 2007. Second peformance. experemented with the viscosity of the paint.
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| Galileo’s Lamp, Performance installation. Hotham Art Centre 3rd August 2007. The painting machine consists of a pendulum with a large reservoir of paint, attached to a electric motor that gives a regular impulse to the pendulum. The impulse is intentionally out of time with the natural period of the pendulum so it moves somewhat irregularly. Combined with the artist adding semi-random pushes to it and moving the canvas along as it becomes heavly marked, the instalation generates large, chaotic, wavelike patterns. The performance continues until the canvas is saturated.
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Galileo's Lamp, Performance installation using paint, canvas, mixed media. Hotham Art Centre 3rd August 2007.
In 1581 Galileo saw a lamp swinging on a chain in the Duomo Cathedral of Pisa and was hit by the realisation that the time of the swing was only dependent on the length of the chain.
This insight allowed Galileo to describe the motion of a pendulum with mathematics and so founded modern physics. A century later, Newton would build on this foundation to describe his Laws of Motion. This revelation;
that the abstract ideas of mathematics could be applied to the real world; and the even more radical thought that the laws of nature could be unravelled by a mere human mind, marked a fundamental turning point in history;
the start of the Enlightenment. We are still feeling the repercussions of this revelation today.
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