John Varah

The virus is a slightly different form of sculpture to the others in this garden of light to mark its unusual form.

There has been much debate over the nature of viruses in the recent past as they appear to lack some of the generally accepted attributes that define things as being alive! They take over and use the hosts own cells to replicate themselves by tampering deep inside their nuclei.

‘For about 100 years, the scientific community has repeatedly changed its collective mind over what viruses are. First seen as poisons, then as life-forms, then biological chemicals, viruses today are thought of as being in a gray area between living and nonliving: they cannot replicate on their own but can do so in truly living cells and can also affect the behaviour of their hosts profoundly. The categorization of viruses as nonliving during much of the modern era of biological science has had an unintended consequence: it has led most researchers to ignore viruses in the study of evolution. Finally, however, scientists are beginning to appreciate viruses as fundamental players in the history of life.’  Scientific American

Im looking at various types of plastic to create the coronovirus light. I’m looking at scale and texture to try and capture the weird geometry and the unusual colours. These colours are often of the microscopic process.

John became part of the Same Sky team  in 1991 and went onto become Artistic Director in 2001

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