Nebula

workbook and studies for Suspension (II)

“One summer morning a shaft of light was coming through a small side window in the gym; low-flying jet planes were roaring overhead, seconds from landing at Terminal 4. The gymnasts were practicing tumbling moves, flying through this directional light and landing on the crash mats, throwing up a burst of chalk dust that swirled, twinkled and hovered in the air after each landing, individual moves cut through by the raw, deafening sound of the planes skimming the roof of the building as they came in to land. The impression of raw sound, light and the flashing colours of their leotards as they twisted through this twinkling patch of light stayed with me, and it is this that I intend to draw on to make an experiential installation.

While visiting Heathrow on a regular basis I was also acclimatising to working with a Nikon D3 – considered at that time to be the state-of-the-art camera for capturing fast moving action in poor light conditions. Disgruntled by the ‘noisy’ quality of the results and the weird dirty colours produced working at such low light levels, I was also aware that I was making images that would have previously been impossible to capture, of young bodies whose like we have never seen before. The introduction of new training aids and apparatus in the gymnasium is also transforming their physical bodies and their athletic capabilities through technological innovation. I reflected on other digital imaging technologies that have allowed us to reconsider our place in the world, in particular the Hubble space telescope and the new generation of cosmic cameras, which allow us to visualise distant parts of the Universe. I became interested in NASA’s representation of the galaxies and star-forming regions. The various clusters of clouds of gas and dust pictured by Hubble, the debris of old exploding stars and the gathering together of latent energy in the star-forming regions, also inspire this proposed work, where the chalk dust, synonymous with the practice of gymnastics, becomes the elemental focus of the new work.” Jo Longhurst

[Suspension (II), a proposal for a light & sound installation with gymnasts’ chalk]