Visualisations - The Nature Book of Art and Science

"JMW turner, the magician of light and colour who was the dominant figure in British Romantic painting in the first half of the nineteenth century, dealt less with conventional boxes of pictorial space than with ‘the wide concave of the circumambient air’. His phrase should be understood in the context of his intuition that ‘the building of nature’ was ‘too colossal for the intellectual capacity, its height to measure or its depth to fathom – the universe and infinitude’."

"...By contrast, the American artist, James Turrell, is creating spatial structures on a huge scale to sculpt the passage of natural light and even to reshape the sky itself – in a Turnerian quest to stretch out to infinite reaches of time and space.
In 1975, Turrell searched for a suitable site for the realization of his vast vision of a new ‘Skyspace’. An aerial survey of the western USA drew his attention to Roden Crater, a cinder cone located at the east of the San Francisco volcanic plateau. The project, commenced in 1979 and due to be completed early in this millennium, involves the excavation of geometrical spaces that will serve as exploratories for our perceptions, as vessels for the enclosure of solar, lunar, and stellar illumination, as devices for the inscription of time (like a sundial or gnomon) and as a compound observatory in which precision, wonder and imagination are united.
At the centre is the crater transformed into a bowl with an even rim, 3000 feet in diameter. For the observer low in the bowl, the vault of the heavens is transformed. Subjectively perceived as a shallow dome – a phenomenon much debated in psychology – the sky appears to be anchored circumferentially to the crater’s rim. Around the crater, chambers are being tunneled out, in such a way that the passage of light – night into day – will paint the interiors with a succession of shaping shadows and luminous colours.
The fumarole, or secondary vent, will be the focus for chambers oriented towards the four compass points, joined to a series of linked interiors to provide varying spatial perceptions. A tunnel 1035 feet long will lead into an oval sky chamber as an atrium for the main bowl. Subsequent progress to the top of the rim culminates in the reattachment of the dome of the sky to the far horizon of the land.
The resonances of Turrell’s project, which is presented through models, paintings, drawings, prints, and photoworks are astonishingly rich. They range from the prehistoric observatories of stone circles and ancient temples, through the great astronomical castle and garden of Tycho Brahe on the Danish island of Hven around 1600, and the camera obscuras of Jesuit magicians in the seventeenth century, to the huge dishes of modern observatories. And, at its heart, is a vision of ‘infinitude’ worthy of Turner.
As Turrell says, ‘looking at light in a skyspace is akin to a worldless thought’- and such thought has boundless potential."