Fire Wall

“Constructed from enormous wooden power/communications cable reels, these huge discs are carefully sanded in the centre, and treated with copper leaf. The title of this work invites many unlikely elements to coincide: a fire wall is a network security system that monitors and controls incoming and outgoing online network traffic, based on predetermined security rules. But the title alludes to more than just the pragmatic. The sculptures are immense; 2.5 metre industrial wooden discs take on the mythological stature of chariot wheels, or a medieval religious triptych, or, perhaps, the powerful shields used by the Valkyries on their journey to Valhalla. The shields becoming quite literally, a site of tension between us and the titanic forces of nature.

de Fouw presents us with the idea that we live in a time when things are slipping and loosening their grip on defined meanings and distinctions. Drawing inspiration from historical (and often heretical) figures in science as much as mythology and folklore, the sheer scale of Fire Wall (2021) invokes a hallucinatory quality, like the sort of mirages that might appear in extreme cold, or extreme heat – a hypothermic trick of the mind – what was that light? Where is it coming from? Is that a shield or a piece of industrial waste?

The burnt black holes through the copper leaf surfaces of Fire Wall (2021) refer to early drawings by Galileo of his sunspot observations. Sunspots are dark areas of irregular shape on the surface of the Sun. Galileo argued that these spots were, in fact, on the surface of the Sun or in its atmosphere, and although he could not say for certain `what they were, they appeared to him most like clouds. Today, scientists believe that the rotation of the sun causes distortions in the magnetic field. These distortions cause magnetic areas to break through the photosphere, resulting in what we see as sunspots. These disturbances on the surface of the sun emit vast explosions of electromagnetic energy and solar wind, which, when blown out into space, can end up in the crackling pinecones and dazzling lights of the aurora borealis.”

From Ciara Healy-Musson’s essay Northern Lights ➜ for the Tales of Hyperborea catalogue.