Paintings of the Sun

Abstract

For over a year Simon Ingram’s Radio Painting Station has been collecting energy emitted from hydrogen atoms undergoing “spin-flips” in space. The visual representation of this collection is a series of thirty concentrically circular compositions that materialise energy from the sun, and the interstellar medium, in a cartoon-like and painterly way. It is these that the artist chooses to present for his fourth solo exhibition Paintings of the Sun at Gow Langsford Gallery. Radio Painting Station, set up at JAR in Kingsland, is one part amateur radio astronomer's lab, one part painting studio and one part gallery space. The entrance to the space is mostly glass and at street level, with passers-by able to see the progress of the project as a series of paintings multiplies. Local people see the project as their own - parents with children in prams, bar flies en route home late at night from Kingsland bars, dog walkers; all stop to talk with the artist about what is happening in the space. The artist uses techniques and equipment of a painter turned amateur radio astronomer. Rather than looking for visible light with a telescope, he constructed a pyramid-like form and pointed it through a skylight to collect energy at the frequency of 1420 megahertz, then couples this to a special radio receiver and this to his machine. Radio Painting Station’s operation encompasses the period from the 4th of November 2013 to the 28th of April 2015. It was commissioned by Wystan Curnow and Susan Davis for JAR and supported generously by the Chartwell Trust. As well as temporarily turning JAR into an amateur radio astronomer’s painting studio, the artist installed a solar power system, electrifying it, as an off-the-grid project space.