Man, by his reasoning power, can only compare & judge of what he has already perceiv'd

William Blake, There Is No Natural Religion

The fool! the meddling idiot! As though his ape's brain could contain the secrets of the Krell!

Professor Morbius, Forbidden Planet

If I was to fashion a religion, I should make use of electricity...

Paul Fryer, after Phillip Larkin

Petit Mal (above, right) was made in association with physicist and engineer Colin Dancer. It is a lightning generator sculpture which produces over a million volts in the form of blue-white arcs which travel through the air between two towers. The object's strangely familiar architecture has dark echoes of future visions; of machines from early science fiction or of strange engines from the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.

Presented in conjunction with Kristy Stubbs Gallery, Dallas, the piece was to be shown for one night only on the 12th of April 2006 at The Temple within the Great Eastern Hotel, Liverpool Street, a suitably arcane environment for the work.

This is the second of Fryer’s electromagnetic machine-sculptures. The first, Deus Ex Machina, was exhibited in his first solo show Carpe Noctum, London in March 2005 and was purchased by Damien Hirst for the Murderme collection.

Petit Mal differs from its predecessor Deus Ex Machina in several ways, the most obvious being power. The new sculpture is much more energetic, producing storms of lightning which may reach beyond six feet. It's appearance is also radically different, with reworked electronics dictating that the power is attracted to itself, whereas Deus Ex Machina would fire out energy in all directions towards the cage which imprisoned it. Petit Mal is not caged, and therefore does not fight to escape. It has a beauty which transcends its violent nature. It is an evolution of the brutally trapped demon that is Deus Ex Machina, elegantly conceived with tall Japanese-Lacquered cabinets whose proportions and form communicate a sensuality absent in the earlier more aggressive sculpture.

The title Petit Mal refers to minor epilepsy suffered in the temporal lobes of the brain that is often associated with charismatic religious experience. Electromagnetic activity causes the abnormal firing of neurons and this has been seen to regularly affect individuals who experience fantastic visions and voices. The Petit Mal fit often occurs undetected, as the only sign of the affliction might be a vacant trance which passes in under a minute. However the experience of subjective time may be an entirely different matter, the voyager being propelled through Blakeian visions whose duration cannot be measured objectively, or experiencing revelations of a spiritual nature which may affect them for the rest of their lives.

It is tempting to view electricity as the stuff of thought. It enables our brains to function in the firing of neurons. Lightning is the primal form of electricity. It was almost certainly the catalyst enabling the formation of life on earth, when high voltage strikes altered the chemistry of the infant land to form the enantiomeric amino acid precursors of primitive organisms. Petit Mal is a powerful symbol of the primal forces which form our inner and outer lives, and a literal demonstrator of those forces. It could be viewed as a super-neuron, unattached from a gigantic brain, firing in the darkness.