Eddington: 'Richard of York gave battle in vain'

Image: © John Sutton Taken: 21 Nov 2021

These lollipop lights outside Storey's Field Centre were designed by David Batchelor and installed in 2018. The Eddington website explains that "The sculpture is made up of seven free-standing discs which are brightly lit with LEDs; at any one time each of the seven discs will correspond to one of the seven colours of the colour spectrum. "As well as providing a focal point for the public space, each of these discs is also a rudimentary clock. At any one point a disc will show a single colour, but over the course of an hour it will slowly move through the entire spectrum – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet – returning to its starting colour on the hour. "Each ‘clock’ will have a different starting colour – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo or violet – so no two discs will ever be the same colour at the same time, but they will also be in a state of constant but barely perceptible change, like the minute hand of a clock. "'Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain' is inspired by Cambridge scholar Sir Isaac Newton’s colour circle. In 1704, in his pioneering work on optics, Newton divided the visible light spectrum into a circle of seven distinct colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. This colour order is often memorised by the common mnemonic ‘Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain’, providing the name of the piece." [On this bright autumn morning the colours were more apparent on the other sides of the rings.]

Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0