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The counter-current turbulence in the Devon river configures like the whorl of the spiral nebula; in the apparent chaos of diverse events and constant motion we sense order. Where the scientist seeks to bring into practical understanding what technologies of observation have discovered, the artist has a different purpose; to create and nurture a sense of wonder at the phenomenal world, and to intensify our imaginative experience of it. These photograms of river and shoreline waters and the sky seen through them are at once revelations of a particular and unrepeatable moment in nature, and images that invite our recognition of resemblance and analogy. Framing them and setting them upright, giving them no captions but the date of their making, Derges removes them from the systems of science and places them within the poetics of vision. Lashed to the mast Turner was the human eye of the storm, his record of it a brilliant fiction.

Susan Derges has just exhibited her large dramatic photograms of the River Taw taken at night using a flashlight, at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, and as this is her first exhibition in Scotland she will also be showing several previous bodies of work. Shown as part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival. Brightly coloured forms created from single brush strokes interact and repeat, to reveal origins in the close observation of nature. Exquisite drawings, watercolours and nature prints were produced in the late Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries by Indian artists for Scottish botanists such as William Roxburgh, Robert Wright and Hugh Cleghorn, who all played a leading role in the establishment of Indian botanical study. The exhibition will be supported by a short lecture series revealing new artistic and scientific perspectives on this little-known field.

David Peat This site designed and maintained by Marcel Gordon . . For further information David Peat is also offering a free Internet Based course on Creativity in Nature and Mind. This will be hosted on the Pari Center for New Learning web site at www. It will run for eight weeks starging on Jung 4, 2001. Much of her work is photographically based, often making exposures directly onto photographic paper without the use of a camera. River flows, melting ice and the growth and motion of tadpoles have all been recorded in this way. Such sequences of photograms take direct inspiration from nature, but Derges's work has also been pursued in experimental contrivances more reminiscent of the laboratory. She has produced a series of Chladni figures and, in a setup borrowed from the physics demonstrations of C. Boys, photographed water droplets in a standing wave.
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