Art in Space: Meaning and potential
A few months ago, I received an exciting email notification – my submission to the Moon Gallery ISS Test Mission was successful and my tiny sculpture called Verdant would be travelling to the International Space Station in February 2022. Gulp. Until that moment, I hadn’t grasped the astonishing significance for my art practice and, as the weeks have passed, the realisation of the significance of placing art in space or on another planetary body. How should society feel about such initiatives, do they have meaning for humankind?
Before I go into more detail about my contribution, let’s start with the Moon Gallery Foundation that has proposed the mission. Based in the Netherlands, its directors are connected to the European Space Agency and their long-term aim is to place a permanent gallery on the moon, hopefully as early as 2025. Through an open call, 100 artists will be selected for this extraordinary gallery, its walls a clear acrylic grid of 10, 1cm square spaces housing 100 mini artworks.
The logistics of sending this precious package safely to the moon warranted a test mission exploring the artistic and technical possibilities of the concept, so the group devised a mission to the ISS. My piece was among those created by 64 artists selected for the test mission (I simultaneously became a candidate for the eventual gallery on the moon). A container made by space payload consultants Nanoracks will house the gallery and record its movements via video while it floats in the famous ISS cupola window. The astronauts are free to interact with the gallery and we are hoping to record their responses.
What attracted me to the competition was the ethos of the Moon Gallery: to include art and culture alongside the scientific and technical aspirations of space exploration, and to encourage interdisciplinary cooperation. As a graduate of the Central Saint Martins MA Art and Science course (2018), I’m an advocate of art/science collaborations and this approach is at the core of my art practice. In 2019 I completed a residency at Mullard Space Science Laboratory (part of University College London) where I followed the ESA’s Euclid Mission and investigated concepts around dark matter and our changing perception of the universe.
Verdant is a response to imagining interplanetary travel to worlds bereft of the life-giving colour green abundant on our luscious planet. Based on the central structure of the chlorophyll molecule (1 magnesium + 4 nitrogen atoms), four green glass beads are tethered to a larger clear bead via fluorescent green threads. I was particularly interested in creating a sculpture sensitive to weightlessness and light – how would its little arms move while on the ISS and how would the unfiltered light of space interact with the glass? In this way, the artwork is experimental, providing an aesthetic understanding of sculpture in microgravity environments. Also, the moon (and Mars) are stark, rocky places with distinctly limited colour pallets and I’m curious how settlers will react to living long periods without the visual freshness of plant life. The green spectrum is part of a bigger concern for our home planet: we are rapidly destroying our most precious wild places through deforestation and encroaching human habitats. The sculpture is bound up with that prospect too.
Of course, science and technology are investigating earthly dilemmas through, for example, satellite technologies but art has a role to play in identifying the emotional qualities of our relationship with nature and, from the vantage point of space, a unique stage is set to examine these responses. The gallery has the potential to spark vital conversations from a unique perspective. Hopefully if enough people ‘watch’ the exhibition, it’ll prompt discussions (amongst the astronauts and at home) and find new audiences for art via space-keen viewers. Art is the glue joining disparate parts of society, binding them together through self-expression. It can help us unravel the harsher aspects of living and is certainly capable of parsing our sticky relationship with technology and nature.
Creative objects abound in sophisticated civilisations so why not take them to space too? I was reminded of this recently when Roman statues were discovered in Buckinghamshire in the UK during excavations for a new railway route (HS2). And last week I saw a beautiful Roman mosaic floor adorning a recovered Roman Villa in Dorchester. The British Isles were once a brave new world for the Romans and they civilised their dwellings with art and design objects. Creative expression has always travelled with explorers and as such we should bring the best of humanity into space.
As I await the tantalising launch of the NG-17 resupply mission to the ISS in February carrying the Moon Gallery’s artefacts, I can’t help but think that a new era of art making is upon us. Others have been there before but perhaps a momentum is building alongside the current push into space. In 1969 Robert Rauschenburg was among a group of artists (including Andy Warhol) who surreptitiously left their marks on a Simm-sized ceramic chip fixed to the leg of the lunar lander* and taken to the moon on the Apollo 12 mission. Many others have since followed with the same goal – sending art representing the human condition into space. When preparing such artworks, artists are necessarily required to think differently, to consider the context of their idea. Expansive concepts can evolve in the process: how does one distil the human voice and experiences to the world and potentially to other life forms in the universe?
Incredibly, I have another space related artwork launching in 2023. A project developed with Prof Tom Kitching (UCL) during the residency at Mullard Space Science Laboratory, this artwork was a collaboration with over 250 Euclid Mission scientists and engineers. The Fingertip Galaxy was produced using their painted fingertips creating a large galaxy drawing and was made at the international consortium conference in Helsinki 2019 with ESA’s assurance that it would be included on the spacecraft. In discussions with Tom, I noted that the Euclid spacecraft design didn’t entirely reflect the humanity that built it. There are over 1,500 people working on the mission worldwide. For many of them space exploration is a passion and their meaningful contributions transcend the science and technology. The Euclid telescope will record and map the furthest galaxies known to science, so we devised a project to express the collective desire to ‘touch space’ in the spirit of curiosity and wonder. Currently, we are designing a small aluminium artwork plaque that will be fixed to the payload structure this spring. Working with poet Simon Barraclough, we’ll integrate a short poem, giving it additional context and meaning for those who might find it in the millennia to come. These two space artworks have altered the scope of my understanding of what art can accomplish.
Prof Tom Kitching and Lisa Pettibone in front of the Fingertip Galaxy artwork heading for space aboard ESA’s Euclid Mission in 2023, copyright Lisa Pettibone
If you’d like to know more about the Moon Gallery and/or make a donation to the project, follow the link below (they also have great merch!). My work with MSSL Space Lab (including a film) can be accessed via my website (link below).
http://www.moongallery.eu/
https://www.pettibone.co.uk/mssl-space-lab-residency
*https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-how-warhol-rauschenberg-and-chamberlain-smuggled-art-onto-the-moon
