The Darkness and The Light / The Clearing / Distance AB
Swansea Observatory
Grace Weir has installed a series of video-based works based on her interest in astrophysics among the workings of Swansea Observatory. She was interested in siting the work in Swansea Observatory from when she first saw the tower on the beach. ‘The way the staircase for the observatory is in a separate tower to the actual rooms of the observatory meant crossing from one tower to another across these small bridges at a great height above the sea and sand. Already you encounter the vastness of space as the sea stretches out to the horizon before entering the small dark observatory to use the telescope’. Grace Weir 2002
Grace Weir’s work coincides with certain writings of Gilles Deleuze that shatter, deconstruct and atomise conventional ideas of reality in order to locate a volatile flux; a moment where the centre ceases to hold, things set to transforming each other and new meaning is imminent. This moment is brief – a flash – before memory, reason and custom begin to close down to smother the anxiety implicit in any such sublime epiphany.
