From Here to Eternity

From Here to Eternity plotted a path from planet earth out into the bigger picture, from the microcosm to the macrocosm, through the work of 5 internationally celebrated artists whose work was positioned at different points along the journey. It began with earthly things: a Richard Long stone sculpture - blocks of granite laid across the gallery floor - and Garry Fabian Miller's fragile leaf prints - cameraless photographs made by sending light directly through the delicate structure of plants and leaves. From these most tangible of artworks we moved to Susan Derges' Starfield series; also made without a camera by sending light through darkness and plant-life onto photographic paper, but set beneath water and against a back drop of the milky way. The work of Vija Celmins also looks up at the stars, recorded here in a new and deeply unsettling series of photo etchings of the night sky. Ultimately all these works are about the human condition, about the smallness of mankind and what it means to be here at all. This tightrope between being and thinking and feeling is nowhere more evident than in the work of James Turrell whose extraordinary light installations simultaneously seduce and confound our senses.