Burning Buildings

I hated Chemistry at school. Seeing things fizz (peanut in a bunsen burner, a chunk of liver in hydrochloric acid) was the only thing that piqued my interest long enough for me to raise my head from it’s horizontal station on top of my textbooks – even then, the theory and equations either side what ever our hapless teacher was combusting made me twitchy with frustration – and with the exception of clipping safety tongs to the Head of Science’s lab coat, I spent most of my science department hours paralysed with boredom. Still, some of those demonstrations at the front of the class must have remained buried in my head, because Australian artist Jennifer Mehigan‘s work, reminded me , amongst other things, of the multicoloured flashes you get if you through pure sodium in a flame (a point: I have both tried this over my gas stove unintentionally when salting water for pasta, and it’ not nearly as pretty and searched for an informative, accompanying Youtube video but they’re all underwhelming). I’m not sure which of her work above and below I like best: the prints overlaid with paint, the less saturated pencil series, or the abstract colour studies (probably the pencils actually. They’d look cool and disaffected on my wall). Either way, they’re certainly more fun and interesting than double science (double win) so this Tuesday morning is shaping up better than the Tuesday morning’s of my youth. E= MC Hammer, and all that.

{Painted photographs are part of Mehigan’s 2010 Armed and Luminous series; pencil/paint on paper work is from Various Kinds of Fire (2011) and pencil on paper from Immortal Diamond, also completed in 2011}