Greenwich Degree Zero (2006)

Greenwich Degree Zero at Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry from 1 October 2011 - 10 December 2011

Greenwich Degree Zero at Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 24 July-10 October, 2010

Greenwich Degree Zero Details of the installation: From left to Right, The Bomb, The Bomber - Martial Bourdin (depicted in The Sun newspaper) and the explosion (35mm film still)

..the work asks us to engage with the mass construction of reality through the media, and holds up a mirror to our own time. Fascinating though this aim is, it's the recreation of the milieu of late 19th-century London, with its community of political refugees from Europe, that really holds your attention. As in a historical novel, you're not always quite sure where the real history ends and the fiction begins, save for in the main narrative of events. But in creating the detail, Dickinson and McCarthy make you want to believe in their conceit, to the point that I left half- believing that the Royal Observatory might indeed have burnt down.
Writes James O'Nions in Red Pepper, Read More