The Cosmic Dance - Stephen Ellcock

1. Hilma af Klint, Tree of Knowledge, 1913, Crédit: © Courtesy of the 

Hilma af Klint Foundation - Photo: Moderna Museet - Stockholm

Stephen Ellcock and his visual journey

    Before starting this new format on my website titled "Book Review", I would love to give you a bit of context and background about this new format and my love for (art) books. When I was a small child, I read a lot of books, in class or at home, but they were mostly children's books with a lot of illustrations and not a lot of text. As I grow older, I've stopped reading until I was in high school and I started to play theater and need to read and rewrite the text of the play. At the same time I was doing my literature degree and I had to read more or less than 30 books in a year (poem, etc.).

    While I was doing my bachelor in art at the University of Strasbourg, I bought myself numerous art books to strengthen my knowledge of "important" artists such as Monet, Dalí, etc. But I took a long time finding what I love and what I want to explore in the art field.

    A couple of years went by, and I launched my Instagram account in June 2020. And since then, I received a lot of books from museums and cultural institutions to create my numerous articles and reviews, and in 2023 I've decided to reach out to numerous publishing houses to create this new kind of article.

A few words about Stephen Ellcock

    Stephen Ellcock is a London-based curator, writer, researcher and online collector of images which share his "Cabinet of Curiosities" on his social media accounts, mostly on Instagram (followed by 323 000 peoples).

    The story of his world started out when his sister convince him to open a Facebook account due to one extreme illness. At first, he found it quite boring but gradually he felt seduced by the "visual forum" formed by everyone's publication on the social media. He started uploading pictures (legally and illegally) and sorted them into albums and categories.

    The book, which is published by Thames and Hudson in 2022 is part of a series of books (the second book is already printed for September 2023), and it presents 5 sections titled: The Infinitesimal Universe - God in Miniature - Divine Proportions - In Search of Nirvana - And So On To Infinity.

Preface: Regaining Perspective

2. "Comète de l'épée", Das Wunderzeichenbuch (Le livre 

des miracles), 1552, Crédit: The Book of Miracles

    In the preface and the introduction of the book of Stephen Ellcock, we learn that his art making is deeply link to time, time in the sense of his research, the time of the works he presents and the time he takes to create these complex relations, sometimes making them easily visible if they are from the same century, and sometime aesthetically.

    The first book from this series, "The Cosmic Dance" presents the foundation of this serie, but also his thinking and his personal story telling. 

    In the preface, he deeply focusses on the world perspective. While the word is define as "a technique of depicting volumes and spatial relationships on a flat surface. Compare aerial perspective, linear perspective.", the author tell us that a lack of perspective can destroy a human being and put the earth under the chaos of the pictures.

    And for him, the perfect perspective is the one presented in this book, which took 10 years to produce. 

    Later, in his introduction titled "As Above, So Below", his questioning and replacing the humans in a context, between the different illustrations of the earth, the sky and Adam and Eve, and while the text is quite short, but quite dense, I didn't really love that the works are just "put out there", without any explanations, the localisation or the size of the works if you want to see it in real life.

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5

1 - The first chapter of the book titled "The Infinitesimal Universe" present the works of Louise Bourgeois, Midori Shimoda, Hilma af Klint and Ernst Haeckel around the theme of the details, most of them coming since the invention of the microscope and later of the study of plants, minerals and cells of the human body. All of it thanks to its inventor, Cornelis Drebbel, who invented the microscope with two lenses.

2 - The second section is titled "God in Miniature" and it explore different themes such as the reflection of the human body seeing by numerous regions, religions and philosophers. But also the question of laws, regimes, the discovery of the human organs and the myth of creation. This section features works by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, William Blake and Janko Domsic.

3 - The third section is introduced by an acrylic painting of Herbert Bayer illustrating the idea of Alfred North Whitehead: "the art of progress is to preserve order within change and to preserve change within order.". This section focuses on the relation the human body had on "Divine Proportions" with works by Le Corbusier, Emma Kunz and Georgia O'Keeffe. It started with the importance of research, numbers, harmony and proportion and it's link with numerous science such as mathematic, astronomy and perspective.

4 - The fourth section is dedicated to the "Search of Nirvana", which translated to works by Thomas Cole, Howitt Watts, Hieronymus Bosch and Karl Blossfeldt. This section is made to reflect on our position after our death, between the good and the bad side, the surrealist and the link to death depending on your religion and your country.

5 - The last section of the book feature works by Gustave Doré, Stuart Atkinson, Asa Smith and Thomas Wright. "And So On To Infinity" explores the wish of the humans to create a map of its universe, sometimes making link to different planets and universes, mapping the sun and the solar system, and clearing out rumours from past centuries.

Thames and Hudson

    Thames and Hudson is a publishing house founded in 1949 by Walter and Eva Neurath. Through their passion for books making, they wish was to create a "museum without walls" made accessible to a large public with books exploring the art world and the research of top scholars. 

    As of today, the business is still an independent and family-owned company and they publish a wide range of books from arts (fine, applied, decorative, performing), architecture, design, photography, fashion, film and music, and also archaeology, history and popular culture. In 1958, Thames & Hudson launched one of its best-known series, the World of Art, which became the backbone of its highly varied list.

Books details

Format: Quarterbound.
Size: 23 x 16.5 cm.
Pages: 256.
Illustrations: 307.
ISBN: 97 805 00 25 25 36

Preface: Regaining Perspective
Introduction: As Above, So Below
1. The Infinitesimal Universe
2. God in Miniature
3. Divine Proportions
4. In Search of Nirvana
5. And So On To Infinity
Bibliography
Sources of Illustrations
Sources of Quotations
Index
Acknowledgments

© Lucas GASGAR / Lucas Art Talks 2023