The Irish visual artist Professor Eamon O'Kane is investigating the recent past through a ten-year project at a site in Denmark and is using the archive accumulated from this research as a comparative to the distant past of a Neolithic site, Newgrange in Ireland. O´Kane uses an observation made by Buckminster Fuller where he relates Einstein´s theory of relativity to a deeper understanding of the universe, explaining that when one looks at the night sky one is looking into a type of time machine where it is possible to see stars that have died many thousands of years ago simultaneously with stars which are being born more recently. O´Kane is developing artworks which examine the history of humankind’s relationship to mapping the night sky and the cosmos through mark making and symbols. He compares different approaches throughout the centuries including the stone carvings on passage tombs at Newgrange which date from 3200 BC right up to images of space produced by NASA.
The title Dark Matter refers to the invisible form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe and about a quarter of its total mass–energy density or about 2.241×10−27 kg/m3. Inspired by Robert McFarlane's Underland where he explores Neolithic burial chambers in the Mendip Hills of Somerset, and North Yorkshire’s Boulby Underground Laboratory, where physicists such as Christopher Toth investigate dark matter a kilometre below the surface. O'Kane makes connections between early indgenious belief systems and their understanding of the unknown and more contemporary thoughts about the origins of the universe.
