Wright was active in the second half of the eighteenth century, and it’s apparent that he was one of the first artists to understand the industrial revolution. I believe his most famous work is An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768), in which a travelling scientist puts on this ‘show’ of air being sucked out of a jar for a group of people, the result being that a bird inside the jar will inevitably die. The audience’s reactions reflect different shades of emotional response: there are the young girls who look as if they’re about to cry; the philosopher who’s deep in thought over the mixed moral, epistemological and metaphysical complexities raised; the couple who are more interested in each other than the creature, the young man who’s completely captivated by the whole spectacle, and another gentleman who, after realising the bird will not be returning, closes an empty cage. As with the experiment, the painting can’t help but enrapture its audience to the dangerous magnificence behind such daring ideas.

He was fascinated by such revolutionary thinking, and I discovered that there was a Midlands-based organisation, the ‘Lunar Society’, at which Wright and other key thinkers, including Benjamin Franklin, James Watt and Erasmus Darwin (Grandfather to Charles), would meet to discuss radically different scientific thoughts and methods. You’ve heard of the Enlightenment period? The Lunar Society was the embodiment of the Enlightenment: the Enlightenment actually working. You’ve got a load of key figures in this part of the world exchanging letters, throwing ideas out into the ether and generally treating each other equally. Amazingly, it wasn’t just made up of specialists, it was all kinds of people, such as composers, writers, artists, etc. so because the exchange of information was all quite free and easy, you’d tend to discover that when a discovery was made, it was a collective discovery. I think it was ingeniously incestuous: you’d get a geologist who had recently written a treatise on the age of the earth, talking with someone at a dinner party who was considering the possibility of humanity evolving from one source. Sometimes, in fact, it’s hard to tell where one person’s discovery ends and the discoveries of the collective began. They were making these discoveries, not for personal advancement, but for the advancement of mankind. Their future; our present.

Unfettered collaboration helped spark the Age of Enlightenment, and if this Lunar Methodology teaches us anything, it is that we must be bold in our quest for excellence. For too long, creative individuals have harboured their talents but with our country in such a state of disarray, now is not the time to be restrictive. Let us not live in Joseph Wright’s dramatically painted shadows, but follow in his light, watching as our ‘incestuous’ collaborations ignite the fires of a new cultural renaissance.

Discoveries by Kieron Edwards, Written by T. Grayson.