Lewis Andrews
'Wild Islands, Ancient stones, Dark Skies'.
Mayes Creative - St Agnes: Isles of Scilly Group Artist Residency.
1st - 5th October, 2024.
The isolated, craggy island of St Agnes enjoys a unique atmosphere, feeling wild and isolated compared to the rest of the archipelago. ‘St Agnes and Gugh are a 20-minute boat ride away from St Mary's, right out on the Wild Atlantic Edge with only 80 or so permanent residents. Gugh has many Bronze Age ancient sites including a complex centred around Kitten Hill. Including entrance graves, stone rows and a standing stone called the Old Man of Gugh, all of this is accessed by the sandy causeway from St Agnes. The group of artists participating were based at Troytown Campsite during the residency on the western side of the Island looking out into the Atlantic.
Lewis was one of the artists invited to take part in the residency. Inspired by a previous visit and the unique surroundings of the Island, his works from the residency aimed to capture the aura & deep time encapsulated within the landscape, the ancient sites visited and the present moment of the location in cosmic time with the night sky.
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Residency Artworks:
Ghosts of the Night Sky - Isles of Scilly Editions
St Agnes, Isles of Scilly, UK. 03/10/2024.
Almost all of the lights in the night sky are ghosts. The further you look into the cosmos, the further you look back in time. The closest star to our sun is 4.2 light years away. Meaning that the light coming from Alpha Centauri is 4.2 years old. Some of the stars you see at this present time in the night sky have probably already died thousands, millions or billions of years ago. However, the echoes of their existence in the form of their ancient light still arrive today on our doorstep. Even our Moon is no exception. It takes light 1.5 seconds to arrive at earth after being reflected by the moon's surface. Meaning the moon is 1.5 seconds old. Do you believe in ghosts? look at the night sky.
Shores of a Cosmic Horizon.
'Shores of a Cosmic Horizon' follows a similar approach to the sister artwork series 'Ghosts of the night sky' in capturing the night sky. However, Unlike 'Ghosts...', These photographic works remain in full colour and place a greater emphasis on the horizon line of the sea being included too within the photograph. St Agnes, being a small island among the Scilly isles, is surrounded by the Atlantic. A walk around the island will only take around 30 minutes and always brings you back to the shore. When the sun sets and the sky is clear, the stars create a canvas with thousands of light sources across the sky. Taking the name after a quote and episode name from Carl Sagan's famous series 'Cosmos', 'Shores of the Cosmic Horizon' puts us not only on the shores of the surrounding ocean but reinforces that standing upon the surface of Earth when we look up into the night sky, we gaze into an almost infinite ocean of phenomena we strive to understand.
"The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be."
"The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we've learned most of what we know. Recently we've waded a little way out. maybe ankle-deep. And the water seems inviting. 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 are made of starstuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."
- Carl Sagan. 'Cosmos: A Personal Voyage' - Episode 1: 'The shores of the Cosmic Ocean'. 1980.
Granitic playground
Granitic Playground visually documents the rock features upon St Agnes, Isles of Scilly, UK. Below much of the southwest peninsula of England lies a Granite intrusion known as the Cornubian batholith. Estimated to be a few kilometres deep, the batholith was a magnetic event of significant proportion which coincided with the mountain-building event known as Variscan Orogeny. During this event, collisions between ancient continents led to an uplift and formed the Variscan Mountains stretch from the Isles of Scilly to the Iberian Mountains in Spain. The Coarse-grained granite on the Isles of Scilly is known as Scillonian Granite and can be seen in outcrops across the landscape. The rocks seen today across the landscape originated deep below the Earth and over millions of years made their way across and up to the surface where it has been subjected to erosion via wind, the sea and temperature changes. The remains of millions of years of erosion and tectonic movements can be seen on St Agnes. Strange rock formations of all shapes and sizes caused by erosion eating away at weaker parts of the rocks create and landscape which could be compared to a natural playground of the elements.
