Distant Orbits

Presented at Penrith Regional Gallery in Lewers House during the House of Wonder residency, as part of the exhibition Gravity and Wonder.
2016, hand crushed ferrite magnets, linen thread, rare earth magnets, colour projections. Installed at Penrith Regional Gallery and The Lewers Bequest. Photographer: Document Photography.

Distant Orbits is a site-responsive installation that unfolds as a weblike structure of linen thread held in tension by small magnetic clusters, forming a distributed field of convergence throughout space. Developed during a residency at Penrith Regional Gallery, in dialogue with Andrew O’Brien, the work was installed within Lewers House as a contained spatial field that could be viewed but not entered. A network of thread extended from ceiling to floor, with magnetic clusters forming nodal points across the room. Blue video projections cast a dim light, producing shadows that echoed and flattened the structure across the walls and floor. These projected forms offered a secondary, two-dimensional register of the installation, recalling distant astronomical observations viewed through a telescope. In this iteration, the work is encountered at a remove. The viewer remains outside the field, observing a suspended system of relations that suggests a cosmological structure held in tension—expansive and all-encompassing, yet beyond reach. The title is drawn from the poem When the Years Take the Stars Away by Carol Jenkins, from her book Fishing in the Devonian (2008).