Cragside - LUX exhibits - Spiegelei

We spent a fun day at Cragside, a National Trust property in Northumberland. It's one of our favourite places as the grounds and the house are magnificent.

Cragside was built by William Armstrong; it was the first house in the world to be powered by hydroelectricity and lit by Joseph Swan's incandescent lightbulb in 1878.

This is the last weekend of a contemporary art exhibition on the subject of light, appropriately entitled "LUX". This blip is called "Spiegelei Junior III" by Jem Finer, a London-based artist. I guess Spiegelei translates as "Mirror Egg" and you can see why.

There's a hole in the bottom of it through which you can stick your head - then you can faintly see a camera obscura view of the surroundings projected on the inside of the bowl via the lenses places at intervals round the bowl - you can see one such lens in the photo. Unfortunately this "camera obscura" view was not possible to capture with my camera (but there's a photo taken from below the sphere, showing the head hole, on the Flickr album - see below).

Best viewed large.

Cragside is such a photographer's paradise that I struggled to choose the blip - there's some more shots on Flickr here.