Taking a Breather: Paper Making

I have the privilege of jointly teaching a paper making workshop with the very talented Jeannelise Edelsten for Hillingdon carers at the Brunel University Arts Centre.  We were delighted to welcome a group of very creative and able people who enthusiastically immersed themselves in the satisfying process of paper making. The group created a wide range of hand made sheets incorporating mixed media and all the techniques we demonstrated. Once again many thanks to the efficient and helpful staff at the Brunel Arts Centre for their support with running the course.

We will be creating a hand made book over the course of the next 4 weeks.

Jeannelise’s beautiful work can be seen on her website www.jeanneliseedelsten.moonfruit.com

Particular Events

I am working with Peter Hobson and Ivan Reid on a project to explore digital holography and the breath. While this project develops I have been looking at Peter's old film-based holograms from a heavy-liquid bubble-chamber experiment at CERN in the early 1980's. Amongst the intended images of particles from high energy proton-nucleon collisions I have been delighted to find these traces left by other particles which coincided with the triggered recordings.

Solar Prints

The forms of words and sounds of significance fascinates me. This is a solar print of the schlieren recording that Peter Hobson and I made of the word 'om', which is suggested to be the sound of the universe.

Cosmic Prints

Just before Easter I had the pleasure of working with Helen Boden at her lovely print studio in Chesham who helped me to create solar prints from the cosmic ray images previously posted. These are some of the prints. 

Anyone inspired to learn more about Solar plates can see Helen's work at www.bodenpress.co.uk

Particular trajectories-Initial Edit

An early edit of the cosmic ray movie 'Particular Trajectories' is viewable on YouTube.

The images above are stills from the footage.

Many thanks to Jason Tinsley for the After Effects tutorial which helped inspire me to create this film. Jason's work can be seen  at www.foundation3D.com.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW6P-QCd7-8

Schlieren Work

I am working with Peter Hobson to visualize the breath and the words carried by the breath using an optical technique called schilieren. A highly sensitized optical field is created which responds to the minute changes in the refractive index of air caused by breath and the spoken word. Early experimentation is demonstrated below illustrates the air movement generated by words and breathing gestures.

National Science and Engineering Week

National Science week provided the opportunity to work with STEMnet ambassador Remco van den Heuvel and children from local schools once again recording breath through photography and monoprinting. The images show a selection of the forms of expired breath recorded on copper plate. The second images show the breath expired into dry ice. Once again many thanks to Brunel Arts Centre for their support on this project and to Averil Horton and Vic Gill.


Remco's work can be seen at the following website:www.rvdheuvel.co.nr

One World One Breath

I was excited to be involved in two community projects during February and March in which I was able to work with local school children to record their breath in a variety of ways. The poster above was created as a result of involvement with One World Week and I am most grateful for the support of Jackie, Karen and Laura from Brunel Arts Centre in ensuring this event was such a success.

Also a big thanks for inspiration from Dave Christopher- I know I still need to work out how to work with spray paint! 

Particular Trajectories

My work focuses primarily on visualizing the breath, however I was invited initially to observe and record the trajectories of cosmic rays as they pass through a saturated cloud chamber with the assistance of Peter Hobson and Chris Selby.

These delicate ephemeral forms could poetically represent the breath of the cosmos. They are mesmerizing to observe as they unfold in the cloud chamber. Cosmic rays are primal yet this year celebrate their hundredth year of discovery by Victor F. Hess.

The images above are stills from video capture of our diffusion cloud chamber. I am currently working on a 4D resolution of the captured footage which I will update the blog with shortly.

Making Visible the Invisible

Welcome to the first Visualising Breath post. As Leverhulme funded Artist in Residence at Brunel University's School of Engineering and Design, I will be producing a series of work in collaboration with members of the Brunel community and primarily with Physicist Professor Peter Hobson.

January provided the opportunity for Peter Hobson and I to travel to Colchester to work with the multi talented photographer and artist Morgana, of Iberian Black Arts, who created these captivating images. Morgana was able to introduce into the background some of the initial work on frozen breath recorded earlier that month.

Images courtesy of Morgana, Iberian Black Arts.