Filtering by Tag: Extractor Space

Copper Bodies & The Logic of Crystals

Added on by Kira O'Reilly.

Copper bodies is a short series of studio experiments, make quickly in Extractor Space, the project room in Tidemill School Studios in Deptford where I currently am lucky enough to have a studio. The studio works takes up from the experimentation during Prologue with Flora Wellesley Wesley, following some of those threads and continuing to work with salt, water, pigment, vinegar, copper, particularly experimenting with cultivating verdigris on copper with vinegar and salt. I don't know where it's going but it feels good simply to do and allow the materials to nudge the next steps.

Dataisnature published a fascinating entry on The Logic of Crystals, featuring the 1924 Space-group Diagrams by William T. Astbury & Kathleen Yardley which describe 'every possible atomic lattice configurations in crystals. The figures formed the basis for what eventually became the International Tables for X-ray Crystallography.' The diagrams are very beautiful, I took to drawing some of them in chalk on the kitchen tiles of Extractor Space, enjoying their tangental connections to the crystals building via the salt, vinegar and copper. Chalking some of them onto the floor they and their proximaty to my crude and elementary chemical reactions reminded me of magical diagrams, alchemy and the fertile origins of contemporary chemistry.


deodand - gifts

Added on by Kira O'Reilly.

Leila Galloways installation deoland was the fruition of a two week residency at Extractor Space, the former school kitchen in Deptford's Tidemill School Annex. 


Deodland was an old English law, abolished in 1862 that legislated that anything thing that had caused a person's death and was to be forfeited to the crown for a charitable purpose, it came from deōdandum, from Latin Deō dandum (something) to be given to God, from deus god + dare to give. 

deod land

Time scales seemed moored into poised moments within Extractor Space, flint gravel from the seashore arranged into simple geometric squareness, branches spindling up from the stones, bare and seemingly growing. Silver permeated, glinting on the flint pieces, pooling against a wall and floor, a magical silver tree in a side room growing upwards and downwards through a window sill. Flints cast in pewter and silver were embedded into the walls, a fragile dried daddy long legs minuscule time and dedicate beside the persisting metals, the space seemed full of threads of these tensions of incredible delicacy and incredible resiliance.

Leila Galloway, deodland, Extractor Space, 2015

photographs by Leila Gallaway.