At Bluecoat, Liverpool (2017)
35mm film loop, projector, motors and prisms
For Bluecoat’s anniversary Roderick Maclachlan harnesses the principle elements of film, time and light, to celebrate the spectrum. Spin combines elements of child’s play, a whirling girl and a spinning top, with the kinetic refraction of Sir Isaac Newton’s experiments with sunlight. Newton’s Opticks, or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light was published in 1704 just a few years before Reverend Styth founded The Blue Coat School in 1708. The emerging science of light and colour was widely debated at the time the school was established.