I am over the moon to reveal a project Louise Beer and I have been working on for the last four months. Under our collaborative name Pale Blue Dot Collective, we have been in residence with Fermynwoods Contemporary Art to create ‘Of Immeasurable Consequence’, an immersive photographic and sound based installation that will be installed in All Saints Church, Aldwincle from Sunday 24th March until Sunday 7th April 2024.
‘Please join us for a launch event from 6:30pm on Saturday 23rd March, featuring insight into the work by Louise Beer and John Hooper and an informal, interactive telescope viewing with an astronomer. The event is free, however please register your place from the link below.
The artists use installation, film, photography and sound to examine our place within the universe, framing the impact of the climate emergency through the eyes of evolution and the immense time period it has taken for each form of life to arrive at this point.
Funded by Northamptonshire Community Foundation's Creative Climate Action Fund, the work combines images, sound and light to transport the viewer to an imagined forest environment. With the artists' interest in the deep time nature of our existence on the planet, they have developed an installation that explores both the fragility and the miraculous nature of life on Earth.
Sound recordings from Fermyn Woods, made with a variety of homemade and professional microphones, are combined with their own archive of field recordings collected from around the world. The final composition transports the audience to a forest outside of our experience. Images taken under moonlight during their residency are installed in the central body of the church, juxtaposed with astronomical imagery that prompts us to consider our own place in the wider Cosmos.’
* In the event of bad weather, the astronomer will deliver a talk inside the church.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/of-immeasurable-consequence-launch-event-tickets-857074883047?aff=oddtdtcreator
My Lunar Landscape series started in 2017 during a residency in Atina, Italy. The main images are produced during the full moon when the weather is clear and the Moon high in the sky. Other images showing the milky way and effects of light pollution.
Light pollution is disrupting animals and destroying bio-diversity as humanity illuminates more of the land. Now the space above our heads is being polluted and many astronomers are warning of the effects light pollution will create for earth based astronomical observations.
“More than one-third of the world – and 60% of Europeans and nearly 80% of North Americans – is now unable to see the Milky Way, even on clear nights…”
As artist we have benefited from witnessing the nights sky, These images will inspire people to search out the clear Skys and next time they hear of the threat of light pollution they may do something.
All images
Hahnemühle Photo Rag
1000mm x 75cm
Pale Blue Dot Collective - Louise Beer + John Hooper
BigCi Residency
Environmental Art Award 2020 (delayed)
Residency completed in July 2022
10m28s
Last verse is a dual screen film made using footage and sound recorded in and around BigCi and up to Blackheath in the Blue Mountains of Australia. The film depicts two temporalities. Firstly from the perspective of a non-human animal and secondly, a cosmic time frame. Are we cosmically insignificant, or cosmically significant?
As we zoom out further, we might think that nothing we do matters, eventually Earth will be absorbed into the sun, and no trace of our world will exist. But what about the fact that there is no other world just like ours, no other world with kangaroos, skinks or gang-gang cockatoos? It has taken our world 13.7 billion years of the universe existing, beginning with an extraordinary start, billions of years of star formation, the gathering dust, the cooling of our rocky world and the formation of our oceans and atmosphere to develop into our home. All of these processes have helped the eucalyptus trees to grow into homes for insects, animals and birds, have helped the pagoda’s to form, have helped our brains to develop in such a way that we can look out at the pinpricks of light in the sky and through research, understand that they are unfathomably old and unfathomably large spheres of gas.
It took a vast period of time for our universe to form into the one we see around us. One day, Earth will no longer exist. Time will go on for an immeasurable period, before time itself will cease to exist. Does each rotation of our blue marble around our star draw the universe increasingly closer to existing without life as we understand it?
10.33m: This sound piece was commissioned by the Ramsgate Festival of Sound 2021, and developed for high quality speakers or headphones. Listen here
This sound piece is created from a collection of field recordings taken in Thanet, Kent.
Our life by the coastline has helped us to reconnect with the inhabitants of the natural world that we spend so much time thinking about. As we look out our window at the water, we are witnesses to the ebb and flow of the daily tides, the same tides which have risen and fallen over millions of years, helping to shape the geological structures and the life forms which exist in and around them. The fragility of these life forms is so apparent as they swim, fly and nest in and around our pollution. We keep coming back to this quote from Rebecca Solnit:
‘We need a new word for that feeling for nature that is love and wonder mingled with dread and sorrow, for when we see those things that are still beautiful, still powerful, but struggling under the burden of our mistakes.’ Our climate change turning point is right here, right now by Rebecca Solnit, 2021.
As we face the overwhelming and complex nature of the climate crisis, it is an important reminder to do everything that we can as individuals to improve the lives of the creatures that we share our local environment with, alongside trying to undo the damage we have collectively done to the wider ecological system.
This sound piece includes the recordings of bats, birds and shellfish.
...as seen from the Emiliano Nardone Observatory, Frosinone, Italy.
Pale Blue Dot Collective was formed in early 2017. It is co-run by Louise Beer and John Hooper
Through exhibitions, performances, screenings and symposiums we endeavour to bring a new perspective about the detrimental impact of climate change, not only us as individuals, our societies but all life and all environments. Framing the impact through the eyes of evolution and the immense time period it has taken for each form of life to arrive at this point, we want to create a space for discussion around the damage we are collectively participating in and its universal impact.
...as seen from the Emiliano Nardone Observatory, Frosinone, Italy.
As we pollute not only our planet but the space around our planet we cut ourselves off from the rest of the Universe.
As we pollute not only our planet but the space around our planet we cut ourselves off from the rest of the Universe.
As we pollute not only our planet but the space around our planet we cut ourselves off from the rest of the Universe.
Made during the Natives residency in Swaledale North Yorkshire, this film is a response to the changing environment of the area and the effects of the recent floods.
Part of the If You Could Collaborate exhibition, January 2010.
Film maker Michael Moloney and photographer John Hooper made a time-lapse film set 2500ft up a big hill in the Great Langdale area of The Lake District. They shot continuously for 24 hours with the camera rotating twice through 360°.