He’s quoted as saying  ”I think it’s incredibly brave to be working with flowers and leaves and petals. But I have to: I can’t edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole.”

I love the variety of the work he produces and the variety of textures, colours and scales he creates essentially from what’s lying around.

More than that though, what I think I really love about his art is the celebration of creation. The celebration of ‘nature as a whole’.  And on top of that I love the fantasy, and where his sculptures take me in my imagination.

In one of my favorite books, Surprised by Hope, Tom Wright talks about the resurrection of Jesus. Specifically he talks about the resurrection of his body. His new body is his old body but renewed. He still has his scars from the crucifixion but he can walk through walls and some of his best friends can’t recognize him anymore.

Wright points us to the hope of the resurrection and the hope of our own renewed bodies and the renewed heaven and earth in which we will one day live.  A renewed earth, which will perhaps still bare some of the scars of this age but will be renewed and glorious once more. Even more beautiful than it is now.

This is perhaps where Andy Goldsworthy’s art takes me in my imagination. It is this world, but it is somehow different. It is this creation but it can walk through walls.

If the TED talk doesn’t appear click here.

I was delighted to find this talk by Brian Cox when I was trawling through TED trying to pick a video to reflect on for this coming module of my Masters course at The Institute. I had recently seen a Horizon documentary by Cox exploring the  subject of Nuclear Fusion titled ‘Can we make a star on Earth?’. His passionate, often humorous presentation of what by any standard is an extremely complicated science was enthralling and challenging.  

In this Ted talk Cox takes us on an inside tour of the world’s biggest supercollider and from there to the beginning of time and space.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is the latest and most powerful in a series of particle accelerators which runs for 27km (16.5m) in a circular tunnel 100 metres beneath the Swiss/French border at Geneva. Over the last 70 years, it has allowed scientists to penetrate deeper and deeper into the heart of matter and further and further back in time.

The LHC fires protons round the 27kn tunnel eleven thousand times a second, at a speed of 99.99999999% the speed of sound, colliding them into each other. They do this in order to recreate the conditions, which existed a billionth of a second after the universe began, in essence creating in a lab a mini big bang.

Why do they do this? As Cox explains the purpose of the whole project is to understand what everything is made of and how it all sticks together. Everything. All hundred billion galaxies of everything.

Cox then takes us through his Creation Story and even shows us a diagram of the universe which he refers to as The Face of God. 

I am constantly amazed by this science which I can barely understand. This science which tells me that the carbon atoms in my finger nail have had to travel billions of miles through space and time, at some point hurtling through the galaxy at nearly the speed of light, and were birthed within a distant star. 

I am constantly amazed that I am here at all and I am increasingly grateful that I am.