Everything is spinning

Today was sunny, that bright and crisp light that you get on a winter's day. The sun has no warmth but everything it touches seems to glow.  I held up one of the test tubes to the light and stared intently. Everything in it was colourless; a fluid globule of glycerol and water sitting in the bottom, underneath the fibre fluff which shone like it made its own light.

I have installed two pollen traps in the Meadows, changing them fortnightly for new test tubes so that we can track the change in pollen as the seasons move on. The test tubes are mysterious things. Pollen is microscopic, so you can't see it in the tube. Occasionally you see a few bits of dirt caught in the tube, but this sits on top of the polyester fibre and the pollen filters through, theoretically at least. You just have to trust the pollen is there, handle the test tube with care as if it contains a precious, invisible magic.

Everything spins with pollen collecting. The mixture in the test tube has to be spun centrifugally to try to mix each one evenly. Once the trap has been on site and (we hope) collected pollen, it can be spun again to help separate out whatever is in the tube.

The installation and changing of the pollen traps is a cycle. I repeat the activity once a week, alternating the sites, and recording the date and other observations each time. As I do this I'm aware that the whole process is measuring a larger cycle, an annual cycle of trees releasing pollen to begin the process of fertilisation to grow new trees. Once those new trees are grown, they will then become part of the cycle too.  And on it goes, endlessly cycling on this spinning planet of ours.

I wonder how I could represent these cycles of different scale and speed; the fast spinning of the centrifuge and the slow spinning of the life cycle of a tree. My original thought, when I started the microseasons project, was that the art work should be presented around all four walls of a gallery space in a circle. Somehow visitors would start in the centre of the room so that there is no start or end point of the sequence of works, just one continuous loop. If you know of a gallery that has a trap door entrance in the middle of the room, let me know.