Mike Collier with Tom Jordan: Moments of Wonder - Vane

Mike Collier works across a number of media and often in collaboration with artists, poets, musicians, composers and natural historians. His work is based on a close observation of, and engagement with, the more-than-human world.

He has been interested in visualising birdsong for nearly twenty years, and since 2016 has worked with the artist and natural history sound recordist Geoff Sample on a series of pieces based on birdsong recordings. Several are in this exhibition, including the large circular LED work, Song of the Wren – the opera singer of the avian world (2026).

Collier’s love of poetry is wide ranging, and he has recently made work influenced by classical Persian poetry, which describes the beauty of the night sky, the vastness of creation, and the insignificance of human life. Two of Collier’s small circular pieces in the exhibition, originally commissioned in January 2025 by the Aga Khan Centre Gallery in London, serve as a reminder of the transient nature of life and the eternal nature of the cosmos. Some of the images from this work have been developed, in collaboration with artist Tom Jordan and animator and designer Nora Nadvegi, into a thirty-minute animation (included in the exhibition) to accompany Dutch composer Richard Rijnvos’s new composition, Aphrodite for shō & string sextet (2022-23).

This is the fourth part of Kosmoscópio, a cycle in which each of the nine Musica Universalis components is depicted in a musical composition. Sometimes referred to as the ‘Harmony of the Spheres’, this ancient Greek philosophical abstraction contemplates the various proportions in the movements of celestial bodies.

A special viewing of this work with Richard Rijnvos present for the event will precede the opening on the evening of Wednesday 4 March and run from 4.30pm.