SpaceUp UK Kings College London

SpaceUp UK
Friday 3rd June
Kings College London

I love the power of social media and the opportunities that can arise from it! After one of the organisers of SpaceUp UK Charlie Laing, had liked an image of mine on instagram I messaged him on the off chance he might be up for a chat about all things spacey to help inform my work better. From this Charlie invited me to talk and show some of my work at the event.

SpaceUP is an excellent opportunity to meet like-minded people and discuss topics related to human spaceflight, exploration, satellites, space tourism and more. The event is partly set up as an “unconference”, which means you also get to decide part of what gets talked about in dedicated sessions and most importantly, take an active part in joining in the debates.

It is like the best bits of a formal conference – the coffee break discussions, networking and excitement at new ideas.

You will get to hear from some incredible speakers on the day in-between breakouts, from cellular science and physiology, plantary science to astrophysics, art in science communication and supporting education in STEMM, to current issues encountered with human spaceflight and satellite constellations.

 

 

 

To say I was a little nervous to be speaking at such a prestigious venue as well as in front of some of the best minds the country has to offer would be an understatement. But to my surprise it went pretty well and people seemed to enjoy it. With feedback including "beautiful" and "that was bloody fantastic!" Here is the transcript of my talk.

Good afternoon everyone

Many thanks for coming along to hear a little bit about my work and practice. I hope you have enjoyed seeing the few pieces on display and being projected.

My names Loz Atkinson. I’ve been a full time practicing artist for over 8 years. I like to think of my work as provocative yet hopeful. Playing with perceptions of what is seen and not seen. I like to create detail, light and colour using layering techniques with paint to give visual, as well as evocative depth.

The start of this work came about a few years ago with notions of wanting to create something mixing nature, geometry, science, maths and psychology. I feel I approach my art practice in quite a scientific way, seeing a question or a problem and working out a way to show that best. Never really looking for an answer necessarily but more of an understanding? Facts, Information, history, nature, life, existentialism and the bondless curiosity of a child or a scientist have always fed my practice whether in a literal sense or in a not so pronounced way.

The sky, be it during the day or at night has always fascinated me, daydreaming watching clouds or being in my youth at least scared of the unfathomable vastness of the universe. That old adage of being fearful of something you don’t really understand. Nature has always been a considerable source of inspiration so I really wanted to create some work to do that inspiration justice. I’ve always enjoyed the strong link between nature and science, as most things are there waiting to be discovered, explained and utilized by great minds such as yourselves.

The cloud series of paintings is concerned with the human need to contemplate, measure, understand and conquer the existential mysteries of the universe, why are we here? What does it all mean? Which of course we are all intrinsically a part of, showing the folly yet importance of such endeavors.

John Lubbock in his book “the use of life” from 1894 said

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”

Adopting the psychological phenomena of Pareidolia - the experience of seeing pattern in random or meaningless data like seeing faces in wood grain, highlighting that indistinct stimuli represented by the clouds by overlaying them with the Golden Ratio expressed as a geometric grid can be forced to be perceived as significant. Commenting that maybe the things we focus on aren’t the significant things we think they are and are missing something bigger.

The golden ratio or fibanacci sequence has obviously been used throughout history in art and architecture and then of course is found in nature. In the swirls of seashells, seed patterns in sunflowers and the spiral of many galaxies… As well as clouds here on earth being an inspiration that grew the work to include these huge cosmic clouds

The Imagined Nebula series continues some of the themes demonstrating the inability to accurately describe the vastness of something, which is so difficult to even perceive never mind portray or understand, especially when we are such a fundamental part of those systems. As Carl Sagan would say "For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love."

Creating the objects within the paintings using different textures so they have no definitive edge that can be perfectly measured showing that however much we think we know or how ever close to those all important answers, we’re always just that invisible line away. Questioning if we can ever be fully objective to such a subjective thing?

To quote carl sagan again “Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

The work also touches on the Macro and Micro aspects of the universe that these huge clouds of gas and dust are made of the same elements that make up us and everything around us and even the geometric structures of these elements can be found in both huge unfathomable colossal bodies as well as the tiniest microscopic particles and forces that hold everything together. I like that geometry is a language. I love the thought that we are the universe experiencing itself and that the huge can also be the small.

Alan Watts once said “You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.” 

I feel I’m very much at the start of this journey of learning, discovery and rediscovery and am very exciting to see how this strain of work develops in the future. And who is to say these Imagined Nebula don’t exist somewhere in the infinite expanse of the universe.

Thanks you so much for listening and having me here at such a fantastic event. I’d just like to say that as important as STEM science, technology engineering and maths are in this world I’m very much in the mindset and in agreement with Dava Newman Deputy administrator of NASA, that this should be expanded to STEAM science technology engineering arts and maths. In the past they weren’t seen as so different and I think the bridging of that gap and the amount we have to offer each other in critical thinking, imagination and creativity to face the challenges we do in this world is as infinitely boundless as the universe itself. Thank you.

 

There were so many fantastic and fascinating speakers like Rochelle Velho and Matthieu Komorowski who spoke about how do you deal with medical issues and illness in space. Libby Jackson from the UK Space Agency talking about her amazing career and all the educational out reach of Tim Peake's mission. Thais Russomano talking about her journey from being a hopeful to become Brazils first astronaut to becoming the Space Doctor!

 

A huge thank you to Charlie Laing and Phil Carvil for having me and for putting on such a fantastic event! For more information please visit www.spaceupuk.org