April 2023 – in colour: on the outside
Izzy Donaldson and Emily Frank painting “in colour’ on the Twin Dome
With our new start to life in the Twin Dome, largely thanks to extended funding from the Shine Project, the building would now start to experience a whole raft of changes and additions – inside and outside.
Our first aim for 2023 was to create a summer exhibition with a new installation by myself under the name of “in colour”. This was going to be designed around the light from the new window and with the timing of the summer solstice. In order to do that we needed to refashion the walls and the dome of the interior (covered in the next blog) but before that I got to work on a new colour idea for the exterior.
The new idea for the exterior would inevitably mean the end of the original, giant Neon sign which had been there for several years. In truth the sign was already gone because about a year earlier all the observatory buildings were due to get a gleaming, new coat of white paint and it was felt that if we left the Twin Dome out of the plan it would appear even more scruffy than it actually was. After all, it would be easy enough to reinstate the Neon sign if we wanted. It turns out that we didn’t.
The Neon thing had been very representative of the beginning of my collaboration with Anne-Marie – taking unmodified inspiration directly from the science of spectroscopy. But things had moved on in nearly ten years and now the colour forms were more abstracted, more interpretive. What has remained a constant however is the implication of code: a code of colour, repetitions of patterns and forms of colour through a space as a way of describing or decoding an environment. Ultimately, in the way that the codes of spectroscopy do, in describing a universe.
The actual painting couldn’t have been done without the help of astronomy students Izzy Donaldson (also as in earlier blog – more big neon), Emily Frank and my daughter Anna Fitzpatrick. At the time of the last stages of painting the heat of the sun kept forcing us away and into the shade but finally the last square stencil was lifted away to reveal the last square of colour and the code. But I have continued to wonder – is it the last square of the code? Maybe not.