|
projects about news exhibitions shop press contact |
DISTANCE MIRROR |
|
| BACK | |
Before I was born, my father had set up an installation in the front garden - a telescope, pointing at the centre of Mercury – not the planet in our solar system, but Mercury the Mirror Planet, 35 light years away. It is made purely of liquid mercury and it’s gravity holds it into a spherical shape. Everything is reflected from it’s surface. His first visitors were a couple and their four year old boy, whose birthday it was. My father explained to the boy that he should stand just next to the telescope and the sunlight bouncing off him would travel to Mercury and would return to the same spot in precisely 70 years time, when it is his 74th birthday. He looked up and lifted his t-shirt, to show off his tummy to the sky. When he returned, an old man, on his 74th birthday, I showed him to the spot. He sat in the chair and stared through the telescope. Through the telescope, he could see the telescope of 70 years earlier, and next to it the bare patch of grass of the garden. Then the four year old boy walked into the circle of the telescope’s view, looked down at the old man and lifted his tummy towards him. His task complete, the boy left. The old man took his eye from the lens and gave a salute to the sky. It was his lifetime since his previous visit. He had grown from boy to man, had his own family – now a grandfather. During all these changes his unchanging light had been travelling across space. Comment – The man’s life is punctuated by his visits to the telescope. He makes a connection with his former self. The process is like a time-capsule, using real time and space as the medium. People tend to look at life through the lens of their present self. The idea of a past self travelling across space, who will return, at the end of ones own life journey can encourage a person to also view their life through the eyes of that past self. A relationship between present and former self is created. |
       |