The Lucy Mackintosh gallery presents Bee Vessel Wax Wave, the latest in a series of investigations by British artist Stephen Felmingham to make visible the unseen or neglected forces at work in the world around us.
Considering the current Art versus Science debate as a hindrance to his pursuit of knowledge about natural processes, he prefers to use the classic experimental question "What if…?” as the launching pad for his exploration. Using a huge variety of methods and materials, the work is nonetheless united by a conceptually adventurous approach and is firmly rooted in the nature of things.
Previous work has seen him unravelling scientific concepts, restaging experiments and testing out ‘forgotten’ scientific theories. These include the ‘Sound Camera’ – a way of photographing fleeting Chladnian figures created on vibrating plates; the Zoetrope project which used early television techniques to create a philosophical uncertainty and the ‘Singing Line’, which allied crystal radio and the principle of the Aeolian Harp to receive a totality of natural and man-made waves.
In this installation for Lucy Mackintosh Gallery, Felmingham has created a series of identical white stone vessels containing beeswax. The slowly heating and cooling vessels of wax form a ‘natural radio’, transmitting and communicating on many levels to the insect world, to humans and to itself via warmth, smell and the creation of the complex hexagonal Faraday wave phenomenon on its surface. In common with his earlier work, this installation reaches beyond the merely visible, providing a metaphor for the interconnectedness between the vibrational quality of the universe and the underlying principles of the material world.
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