Counter-countermeasures

Michael Mulvihill

8 October – 10 December 2021

Michael Mulvihill, New design radome, 2019, graphite on paper, 8x6cm

Michael Mulvihill, RCA, new logo for the 1970s, 2019, graphite on paper, 12.5x8.5cm

Vane is pleased to present the online exhibition, ‘Counter-countermeasures’, in association with SHIM Art Network and Artsy, consisting of the ‘Fylingdales’ series of drawings by Michael Mulvihill made during a three-year artist residency at RAF Fylingdales on the North York Moors in northern England. For over fifty years RAF Fylingdales has scanned the heavens looking for signs of nuclear attack from space, as well as keeping track of the thousands of human-made objects that have accumulated in orbit since the beginning of the space race.

Michael Mulvihill, 10 years of space operations, 2019, graphite on paper, 6x8cm

Michael Mulvihill, TV Colour Demonstration 8 October 1964, 2019, graphite on paper, 20x25.5cm

This was the first time RAF Fylingdales had hosted an artist in residence, and Mulvihill used drawing to explore the myriad of photographs, technical manuals and magazines that have accumulated at the station since it became operational on 17 September 1963. Fylingdales was built by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), a company better known for releasing the music of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Abba. Through drawing Mulvihill explores the entangled relationship between everyday cultural experience and the practices of nuclear deterrence.

Dr Michael Mulvihill is an artist and associate researcher based in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University, UK. He is a co-investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project, ‘Turning Fylingdales Inside Out: making practice visible at the UK’s ballistic missile early warning and space monitoring station’. He was associate producer on the BBC Four Arena film, A British Guide to the End of the World (2019), that is based upon his doctoral thesis ‘The Four-Minute Warning Drawing Machine: revealing the assemblages of nuclear deterrence’, that was the result of his residency at RAF Fylingdales.