Egyptian mythology is woven in with Japan’s Super Kamiokande Neutrino Detectors. Sekhmet was the lion-headed Egyptian goddess of hot desert sun, plague, chaos, war and healing. She was created to destroy humans for not living in accordance of principles of goddess Ma’at.

Ma’at was the goddess of truth, justice, balance and order. She was more than just a goddess to ancient Egyptians who beloved that universe had an order and it was Ma’at who kept everything in balance. This helped ancient Egyptians develop a strong sense of morality and justice.

I believe these ancient goddesses have tales to heed. Thousands of years of a society structured by patriarchal values that uphold the power and heroism of men and deliberately diminish the value of women has created a twisted self-serving monocled view of the world that seems almost childlike in its inability to comprehend the seriousness of challenges that lie ahead.

For almost 30 centuries—from its unification around 3100 BCE to its conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, ancient Egypt was the preeminent civilisation in the Mediterranean world. Female pharaohs were quite common and common women of ancient Egypt could have their own businesses, own and sell property, and serve as witnesses in court cases. They were permitted to be in the company of men. They could escape bad marriages by divorcing and remarrying. And women were entitled to one third of the property their husbands owned. The political and economic rights ancient Egyptian women enjoyed make them the most liberated females of all time.

‘Once Upon a Time, Over the Gravity Well and Far Away: a diptych’, oil on aluminium, 90X145cm each, 2021

This is one of the most important commissions I have done to date as it is for Jennifer Goldsmith-Grinspoon and David Grinspoon. David’s books (EARTH in HUMAN HANDS, Chasing New Horizons), science and philosophy have been instrumental in shaping my creative practice and my worldview.

I wanted the diptych to capture the unique fairy tale-like quality of Arecibo telescope’s ( The Arecibo Observatory) brief existence, its wondrous discoveries beyond our gravity well, and its rather dramatic conclusion.

I chose the title of the diptych from Ian M Banks, ‘Use of weapons’ a Culture novel, where Zakalwe the main protagonist tells a despot on a planet far, far away a story which at first appears to be a fairy tale but is really a description of Culture, a utopian, post-scarcity space society of humans, aliens, and advanced superintelligent artificial intelligence living in artificial habitats spread across the Milky Way galaxy. , ‘Once upon a time, over the gravity well and far away, there was a magical land where they had no kings, no laws, no money and no property, but where everybody lived like a prince, was very well-behaved and lacked for nothing. And these people lived in peace, but they were bored because paradise can get that way after a time, and so they started to carry out missions of good works; charitable visits upon the less well-off, you might say; and they always tried to bring with them the thing that they saw as the most precious gift of all; knowledge; information; and as wide a spread of that information as possible, because these people were strange in that they despised rank, and hated kings . . . and all things hierarchic’

I chose a quote from this book as the title for the diptych for not just the obvious hope one has that someday we humans might achieve, or at least set ourselves on the path to, the hopeful future powered by knowledge as imagined by Iain M Banks in his Culture series.

The title and the source of the title become significant for me as I find the same sense of joy in knowledge and optimism regarding humanity’s future in David Grinspoons books.

‘I know where Odin’s eye is hidden, Deep in the wide-famed well of Mimir;

In Norse mythology Odin’s thirst for wisdom is almost insatiable. In one story Odin sacrificed his eye in return for a drink from Mimir’s well and the cosmic knowledge that he would attain from taking such a drink. Mimir is a mysterious being whose knowledge of all things was practically unparalleled among the inhabitants of the cosmos.

Looking at the Super-Kamiokande an extraordinary apparatus designed to detect Neutrinos, some of the most elusive and mysterious particles in the universe, I was reminded of the story of Mimir’s Well. There was the pool of ultrapure water (50,000 tonnes of it) in an immense cavern 40m high buried 1000m below ground where 11,146 photomultiplier tubes wait to detect the interaction of a neutrino that has potentially travelled millions of light years from an exploding star situated on the other side of the galaxy.

The nature of those interactions may reveal information that deepens our understanding of the universe – just as Mimir’s Well promised Odin cosmic knowledge that he was willing to sacrifice so much for. So much effort, so much sacrifice to produce these amazing devices.

I decided on the triptych format for my paintings of the detector as it appropriates a form popular in Christian art as a way to display religious imagery behind an altar, again referencing/combining both themes within the Norse mythological story of Mimir’s well and the scientific effort that is the ‘religious quest’ in our post-religious world today.