‘One holds the image and is held by it; one leaves and the vision is released.’ – Lynette Wallworth
For this installation, Wallworth further develops her celebrated work Hold: Vessel 1, 2001. An immersive installation work, exploring the immensity of the natural world and our relationship to it, Hold: Vessel 1, 2001 invites visitors to carry a glass bowl into a darkened space and ‘catch’ projected images of microscopic marine life and telescopic astronomical imagery in a lens–shaped ‘screen’.
Hold: Vessel 2, 2007, updates the earlier version of this piece with the addition of two newly commissioned video projections. In creating these new projections, entitled Colonies and Light, Wallworth collaborated with specialist cinematographers, utilising current visioning technologies to produce intricate details of underwater marine life, recording how these environments have altered in the last six years.
The new projections also feature rare imagery of the 2004 Transit of Venus, an astronomical event which, in 1769, was used to compute the relative distance from the Earth to the Sun, allowing calculation of the scale of the solar system. This event marked a pivotal moment in history when, for the first time, warring nations chose to cooperate in order to answer one of the leading scientific questions of the day. Wallworth makes reference to this global scientific co–operation and connects it to the effect of climate change on environments and marine species’ highly developed means of surviving in diverse communities.
Imagery for Hold: Vessel 2, 2007 comes from the following sources: David Hannan, Jeremy Pickett–Heaps, Dr Allan S. Jones, Australian Key Centre for Microscopy & Microanalysis, The University of Sydney, Rosemary Golding, School of Medical Sciences, The University of Sydney, Exploratorium, TRACE [Transition Region and Coronal Explorer], Stanford-Lockheed Institute for Space Research, NASA Small Explorer program2, NASA Hubble, hubblesite.org
Hold: Vessel 1, 2001, was commissioned by and courtesy of Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, AU
Hold: Vessel 2, 2007, was commissioned by the BFI, London, and produced by Forma