The Astrologer Who Fell Into A Well

Aesop Fables inspired the title of this exhibition, a morality tale for star gazers who see futures in still waters whilst ignoring hazards on the terrestrial path. Written many centuries ago it revealed the emerging trend to dismiss the sky as a place of speculation, myth and mystery. Cultural demands began to prioritise the day with artificial lighting as a time for production and work, the night is reserved for sleep in preparation of activity.

This waning interest in the night, has an obvious equation with economics, as increased levels of light pollution and urban architecture make the sky barely visible. Personal vulnerability often felt in public places restricts both opportunity and the desire to linger, ultimately looking-up seems a romantic time waste and only permissible in the parameters of STEM research.

Historically the heavens were seen through codes to unlock the myopia of our world. These astral patterns revealed a direct influence on terrestrial lives, this was a topography as full and relevant as those here on Earth. 

Today, the gravitational force of planetary transits is a minor concern to the predilections of the everyday and the “out of this world” is most often located in metaphors of excess.. Historically, Europe with revolutions both industrial and cultural of the 18th and 19th century shifted renaissance and baroque skies into theatrics.

It was post world war cinema that developed the Sci-Fi genre, merging heavenly representations with augmented modernity. This created a new cosmic sublimity, reframed in movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, adventures that often included spiritual narratives. Filmic protagonists journeyed with spiritual overtones, exaggerated in hyper colour with emphasises on transcendental experience.

Despite the media coverage of proposed trips to Mars, for most of us, the heavenly departure gates are permanently closed and for the first time there is a loss abilities to imagine anything not of this Earth. "There is nothing more than this", is perhaps, a soporific acknowledgment as anxieties for the future are increasingly relieved by technology. Collectively as humans we spend the majority of our time in interior space and our sensorial perception is mostly through computer or phone screens usually in solitary stimuli of online imaging and streaming sounds. 

Yet despite this the sky can still conjures wonder, even when dimmed with the orange glow of a city, plane lights blink at the crescent moon and we know that satellites deliver data faster than portents of eclipses and comets, but even so a cloudless night can inspire some surprising thoughts:

We can venture virtually to create the virtuous in mimetic heavens when we wish upon synthetic stars. 

"This astrologer in the well, resembles all of his false art, who while they are in danger, dream, that in the stars, they read the happiest theme.” - Aesop