Artists > 2012: Flights of Fancy > Jem Finer

Work

Jem Finer’s Spiegelei was a treatment of the everyday, with an off-the-shelf shed relocated to Tatton, obscuring the visual path to the Japanese Garden and Golden Brook. But atop the shed sat an enormous, shining ball of stainless steel; inside, the work was a Tardis of sensations – with familiar daylight transformed into a purple haze as steps led to the interior of the dome. Once positioned, the viewer experienced a severe dislocation: Finer had installed three lenses in the sphere, which, acting together, created a 360-degree camera obscura, delivering an inverted vision of the world outdoors, with sky below and rippling water above. Sound, too, was distorted and deranged: small noises were amplified and reverberated around the sphere. Finer states, "Gravity is, on reflection, absurd. It’s easy to take for granted but when one stops to consider it, we’re not standing upright at all, we’re all stuck on at angles to each other. We literally are standing as if glued to the surface of the earth, pointing down towards its centre. In Knutsford one is standing at an angle of 53 degrees to a person standing at the equator." Finer’s inspiration for the work comes, in part, from his experiences growing up in Knutsford and the lure of Tatton as a site for experimentation with mind-altering substances. 

The work was produced with Julia King and Atelier One Structural Engineers. 

Spiegelei has been loaned to Compton Verney, Warwickshire, and will be open to the public from March - December 2011. 

Biography

Jem Finer is a UK-based artist, musician and composer. Since studying computer science in the 1970s, he has worked in a variety of fields, including photography, film, experimental and popular music and installation. His 1000-year long musical composition, Longplayer, represents a convergence of many of his concerns, particularly those relating to systems, long-durational processes and extremes of scale in both time and space. Among his other works is Score For a Hole In the Ground, 2005; a permanent, self-sustaining musical installation in a forest in Kent, which relies only on gravity and the elements to be audible. Between 2003 and 2005 he was Artist in Residence in the Astrophysics Department of Oxford University, making a number of works including two sculptural observatories, Landscope and The Centre of the Universe. He is currently working on a number of new projects continuing his interest in long-term sustainability and the reconfiguring of older technologies.