"Sometimes when you’re looking for one thing, you find something completely different and unexpected”.                                   

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Portrait of a Chicken as an Egg (Candled) within A Golden Rectangle


Sandrow’s unexpected discovery (August 2017) that an egg set on by Gold Lace Hen Rupam posed upright while candled resembles moons, planets and stars (our sun). Subjects of study (Untitled Observations spacetime ) at the time, when by Chance, her path crossed with the white Padovana cockerel in wooded Shinnecock Hills (2006).


The penetrating light of “candling” reveals the condition of the egg’s air cell, yolk, and albumen. That enables observation of embryonic development inside the shell. And when pictured calls into question the micro to the macro: during a year celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of space exploration, the first walk on the moon.


Recent scientific studies prove bird embryo’s respond to events outside their shell: “Even Unhatched, Birds Exchange Survival Skills. Eggs vibrate in response to parental alarm calls, then pass on the warning to nearby eggs.... and in return receiving cues from nearby unhatched siblings.” (Note 2)


A contemporary influence and inspiration for Sandrow’s work is artist Nancy Holt, including Holes of Light  and Locators. Her “major themes were vision, memory, perception, time and space. Using the natural environment as both medium and subject, Holt endeavored to make her audience conscious of the cyclical time of the universe, the daily axial rotation of the Earth and its annual orbit around the sun." (Note 1)


copyright © 2021 Hope Sandrow all rights reserved


 

"...the problem about the egg and the hen, which of them came first, was dragged into our talk, a difficult problem which gives investigators much trouble. And Sulla my comrade said that with a small problem, as with a tool, we were rocking loose a great and heavy one, that of the creation of the world."                                                  Plutarch, Table Talk, Moralia 120 AD                                                                        

A Hen lays an Egg after light-sensitive cells behind her eyes message her ovary to release an ovum into the egg yolk. Fertilized by sperm, coated by albumen, encased in shell as the egg travels through the oviduct. This  creative process encompasses twenty-four hours; as the rotation of Earth on its axis.                                                     

Hope Sandrow spacetime   

Note 1: http://www.parafin.co.uk/artists--nancy-holt.html


Update September 24, 2020: “Newfound brain structure explains why some birds are so smart—and maybe even self-aware” concluded in two studies (released to the public September 24, 2020). “ In recent years, birds have been found to make tools, understand abstract concepts, and even recognize paintings by Monet and Picasso...”