Contemporary mirror art
Parabolic mirror. 21cm diameter 1969
These photos show one of my early artistic experiments using mirrors when I was a sixteen years old still at school. My apologises for the quality of the images – they are quite old and I developed the negatives and printed them myself.
I think if I were to give this work a name now I’d probably call it Sky Bridge or something similar, because it links the earth to the sky. The name Sky Mirror also comes to mind, but Anish Kapoor’s already used that.
The concept behind the mirror actually bears several similarities to Anish Kapoor’s Sky Mirror, in that it’s a concave mirror that reflects the sky, although Kapoor’s Sky Mirror is thirty times the size and cost about a million pounds more. I think I probably paid for this one from the money from my paper round. Anish Kapoor wasn’t yet a student at Hornsey College of Art at the time of these photos.
The mirror is an eight and a half inch parabolic mirror which I ground for a Newtonian reflecting telescope that I constructed as a teenager in 1969. My ambition for a career at that time was to become an astronomer, not an artist.
As you can see from the first two photos, I’ve positioned the mirror in front of a rubbish bin (of a type that was used in the late 1960s) in the least aesthetically pleasing part of my parents’ garden.
The second photo, below, (which is massively underexposed in order to show the mirror, which would otherwise be just a disk of burnt-out white), shows the mirror propped up against the rubbish bin. You can see the sun and the sky reflected in the mirror. This is perhaps meant to show the contrast between the beauty and purity of the sky in contrast to some of the rubbish created by human endeavour (or to be more specific, my parents). It’s probably also meant to show that ultimately everything is connected, the beautiful and the ugly, the transcendent and the mundane.
The photo below shows the mirror on the ground amongst some trees. This is probably meant to show the link between the earth, the natural world and the sky, and by extension the cosmos.
