Foreword

imagery and various unrecognisable human figures appearing, all pinned together with a cropped square in the middle of the screen displaying images of the sun reflecting on water, representing the Atlantic. It is augmented by the Francis-Marie Utti soundtrack which begins with radio-like interference and then moves into a more melancholic string ensemble that sounds like grinding and scraping metal. This fits with the abstract images of metallic transmission antennae from Marconi Beach in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where the first transmission from the United States to the UK took place. Amongst these images is a photograph of The Ring of Brodgar, an ancient stone circle found on the Orkney Islands in the north of Scotland. Along with the more renowned Stonehenge, these sites are said to have connections to summer and winter solstices and also to other astronomical alignments, functioning, perhaps, like a receiving station from the heavens. To broaden this concept, one of the first images we see in the piece is that of an astronomical chart and later on, an image of a radio telescope. This radio telescope was from an earlier, related piece by the artists called Radiant, A Personal Observatory (1988), this featured a receiving dish with a monitor in the middle playing out sections of what would later become Solstice. Not long after radio communications had been firmly established in the years after Marconi’s experiments, the direction of these receivers were pointing up into outer space, gathering signals that have allowed great advances in our knowledge of the universe. Just like the ancients, our fascination with celestial phenomena has not diminished. At the end of Solstice, the cropped square with the water and sun tilts towards the horizon until it disappears into a line. Thus, the sun, in an electronic sense, ‘sets’, bringing the piece to a close. The video installation Television Circle (1987, Fig. 12) or Electron when shown as a single screen, by the LonFig. 11. Madelon Hooykaas, Elsa Stansfield, Solstice, 1989. Courtesy of Madelon Hooykaas. EWVA | European Women's Video Art in the 70s and 80s 36