Oil painting (2018)
Inspired by working with vulcanologists on Mount Etna, Sicily, Italy in 2018. In early 2018 I worked with a group of vulcanologists on the volcano Masaya, in Nicaragua (Central America). One of those scientists had a research project on Etna and later that year I joined him as a volunteer. The work on the day that inspired this painting involved using GPS data from satellites to determine the exact height of certain reference points on the volcano, the data then compared to a multi-decade set of readings to determine how the mountain was changing shape. For a quality comparison, we usually tried to set up an antenna to operate for a couple of hours, which would yield a large number of GPS data points, and thereby provide greater statistical accuracy. In some locations the antenna was close to areas where visitors passed and one of us would stay to ensure no visitor inadvertently disturbed the equipment; in more remote locations we would often leave an antenna while we went to the next site. Here we had left an unit to its work and the weather changed, with thunder and lightning beginning over Sicily. Working on an exposed mountain with antenna equipment is obviously not something that should be done in a thunderstorm and we hurried to dismantle the equipment. It was not my turn to assist in this process and I therefore took a series of photographs, one of which of two of the team running inspired this painting.
Date: 12/06/2019
