This piece was conceived for the group show Exhumed at The Garden History Museum on the theme of people who had died and been buried in the former churches graveyard. This piece was intended in part to make a relationship between the line drawn between a satellite and the earth and that drawn by lightning striking the earth.

The following text was written by Jordan Kaplan for the exhibition catalogue Exhumed ¹:

What is now proved was once only imagined

Blake, William: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790 - 1793.

The acknowledgement that lightning strikes were attributable to naturally occurring climatic forces rather than some form of’ divine intervention’ finally came in I752 in the guise of a kite. Flown by Benjamin Franklin during a June storm in Philadelphia, the kite made contact with an electrical current, its loose threads stood erect, and Franklin touched the kite string to a key. Sparks flew and Franklin’s hypothesis was proved.

Traditionally, lightning had served as a powerful persuader for the argument of God’s omnipresent force: the Lord’s representatives on earth were quick to point to their understanding of a divine power able to righteously smite sinners from above.

The contact voltage of a typical lightning strike delivers about 300 kilovolts into the human body over the space of a few milliseconds. In a process called ’external flashover’, the current passes over the surface of the body resulting in deep burns centring on the points of contact and exit, most commonly the head, neck and shoulders. Only 20% of those struck by lightning are immediately killed, the leading cause of death being cardiac or cardiopulmonary arrest. The majority of those who survive lightning strikes experience residual effects, which are most commonly manifested as neuropsychiatric, visual and aural related trauma.

Men are four times more likely to be struck by lightning than women. Both JOHN WARD in I666 and WILLIAM BACON in I787 were struck and killed by lightning in the parish of St Mary-at-Lambeth. Mr Bacon’s dog was also killed during the I787 strike.

As William Blake observed, and Benjamin Franklin proved, a thunderbolt strikes only where a negative charge is projected upward from the Earth. When lightning strikes, the negative space between the heavens and the earth is drawn together for a fraction of a second, defining, however briefly, a balance between the two spheres.

Governments and private organisations now control the heavens, able to analyse and judge what they witness. The spatial dynamics of satellite observation mimic what was once God’s vantage point, though ultimate control and responsibility for such machinery is distinctly earth-bound.

details of the marriage of heaven and hell (2003)