BREESE LITTLE | dark frame / deep field

dark frame / deep field

4 June – 1 August 2015

Curated by

Marek KukulaMelanie Vandenbrouck

Table of Contents

Introduction | 6 – 9

Exhibition Installation Views | 10 – 19

Catalogue Entries | 20 – 133

Extended Essay by Curators Marek Kukula and Melanie Vandenbrouck | 134 – 155

Back Cover:

The Crater Schmidt, Sea of TranquilityApollo 10May 1969

Vintage gelatin silver print20.4 x 25.3 cm

[NASA AS10-34-5162], caption on verso

Front Cover:

Dan HoldsworthBlackout 13, 2010

C-type print, mounted on aluminium, white aluminium frame183 x 233 cm

Edition AP 1, from Edition of 3 plus 2 APCourtesy the artist

Opposite:

Martian sunsetViking Lander 1

August 1976Vintage chromogenic print

20.4 x 25.5 cm

dark frame / deep fieldCaroline Corbasson, Dan Holdsworth, Philippe Pleasants, Sophy Rickett, WeColonised the Moon and vintage NASA photographers

30b Great Sutton StreetLondon, EC1V 0DU

4 June – 1 August 2015

When NASA circulated the first documentary and scientific photographs takenfrom space to the public in the 1960s they brought the alien and distant into starkproximity with the mundane. With Earthrise (1968), Apollo 8 astronaut WilliamAnders captured the emotional impact of the ‘Space Race’, allowing us to reflecton the beauty, frailty and unicity of our planet Earth and our place within theuniverse.

Today, as telescopes and spacecraft send back images which are arguably just aspowerful in their aesthetic impact as in their scientific content, it is perhaps artistswho are best equipped to interpret what these dispatches tell us about humanity’srelationship to a cosmos in which we seem ever smaller and less significant. Indark frame / deep field, six contemporary artists explore the limits of our ability toimage, map and define the universe, with artworks displayed alongside vintagephotographs from NASA that first brought the breath-taking scale of outer spaceinto view.

Two works by Caroline Corbasson span the entire history of telescopic explorationconceptually, referencing Galileo’s revolutionary drawings of the Moon from 1609as well as the 13 billion-light-year compression of 2005’s Hubble Ultra Deep Field.Her large-scale Crater (2013) inevitably conjures up early observational sketches ofthe lunar surface, as well as more recent photographic moonscapes, but is in facta depiction of a 50,000 year-old impact feature in Arizona. Meanwhile, with ameticulous layering of star maps in Naked Eye (2014), Corbasson seems totransform the flat cartography of the sky into a three-dimensional simulation ofthe entire universe.

Above: William AndersEarthrise, the first ever witnessed by human eyesApollo 8, December 1968Vintage chromogenic print, 20.2 x 25.4 cmNASA AS8-14-2383

Opposite: Exhibition Installation View, June 2015

In his Blackout series (2010), Dan Holdsworth presents the Earth itself as an alienobject, turning an astronomical eye back towards our own planet. Holdsworthdefies perceptions by reversing negative / positive values, morphing the sooty iceof the Icelandic Sólheimajökull glacier into a spectral veil set against theinscrutable darkness of the northern sky. Barren and supernatural, the transmutedgeology recalls the digital data beamed back by probes that have mapped theterrains of Venus, our solar system’s moons and asteroids

Astronomical photographs record time as well as space: not only do theycompress a duration of seconds, minutes or hours into a single exposure, theyalso capture light that has been travelling towards us for years, decades ormillennia. Philippe Pleasants’ poetic skyscapes (2010 - 11) condense the passage oftime as marked out by the motion of the Moon, Sun and stars. In his solar andlunar durations the temporal element is spatially anchored in specific Englishlandscapes, but in Trace 3 and 4, the sky’s motions are stripped of all earthlyreferences to become an abstract grid of curving lines.

With Objects in the Field (2013) and the Observation series (1991/2013), the resultof a collaboration with Dr Roderick Willstrop from the Institute of Astronomy,University of Cambridge, Sophy Rickett unearths the archaeology of astronomyitself. Rickett’s work juxtaposes deep time with history on a human scale byresurrecting astronomical photographs which, although they are only a fewdecades old, are already technologically obsolete.

Displaying their characteristic playfulness, We Colonised the Moon (Sue Corkeand Hagen Betzwieser) reveal the political implication of Neil Armstrong’s ‘smallstep’, when the Moon irrevocably became a place, rather than a distant light in thesky. In bold, ‘pop’ colours, the silkscreen prints Frigoris and Tranquillitatis (2012) re-appropriate lunar cartographic data from the US Geological Survey to queryhumanity’s claims on Earth’s satellite. Using the ‘high-brow’ rhetoric of traditionalmuseum display, As Good as a Moonrock (2012) questions conventional methodsof classification and the authenticity of lunar exploration.

Sophy RickettObservation 1231997/2013Silver gelatin print180 x 120 cmEdition of 5 + 2 APCourtesy the artist and Grimaldi Gavin

By juxtaposing early space photographs - whose value at the time was as muchabout public relations as it was about science - with creative responses fromtoday’s more cynical world, dark frame / deep field demonstrates a maturingengagement with the sublime spectacle beyond our world’s atmosphere. At thetime harbingers of the future, vintage NASA photographs have the graininess andfaded colours of holiday snaps of the same period, giving them an aura ofnostalgia and optimism. But our frontiers never cease to expand. On 14 July 2015,NASA’s New Horizons probe will rendez-vous with Pluto after a ten year voyage,bringing another world into sharp focus for the first time. In the seventeenthcentury it was the beauty of Galileo’s drawings which brought home the fullrevolutionary import of his discoveries. In the twenty-first century, astechnological advances give us access to ever more dizzying and humblingastronomical vistas, art is once more playing a vital role in conveying the meaningand implications of cosmic exploration.

dark frame / deep field is curated by Marek Kukula, astronomer, writer andbroadcaster and Melanie Vandenbrouck, curator and art historian.

The exhibition is kindly supported by our exhibition media partner, super / collider,an independent agency which explores science from a creative standpoint.

The show coincides with the arrival of the NASA space probe New Horizons atPluto on 14 July 2015.

Sophy RickettObjects in the Field1991/2013Black and white bromide print54 x 51 cmEdition of 10 + 2 APCourtesy the artist and Grimaldi Gavin

Caroline CorbassonCrater2013Charcoal drawing composed of 9 individual panelsEach panel 75 x 105 cm, total circa 650 cm£7,200 (excluding VAT, including London delivery and installation)Courtesy the artist

Caroline CorbassonNaked Eye2014Unframed screen-print, bulldog clips180 x 150 cmAP 3/3£3,600 (excluding VAT, including London delivery)Courtesy the artist

Dan HoldsworthBlackout 132010C-type print, mounted on aluminium, white aluminium frame183 x 233 cmEdition AP 1, from Edition of 3 plus 2 AP£20,000 (excluding VAT, including London delivery, installation and framing)Courtesy the artist

We Colonised the MoonFrigoris / Tranquillitatis (United States Geological Survey maps)2012Silkscreen90 x 90 cm (paper size), 60 x 60 cm (image) x 2 Edition 10 + 3 APSold individually£2,250 each (excluding VAT, including London delivery and framing)Courtesy the artists and BERLONI Gallery

Sophy RickettObjects in the Field1991/2013Black and white bromide print54 x 51 cmEdition of 10 + 2 AP£3,000 (excluding VAT, including London delivery and framing)Courtesy the artist and Grimaldi Gavin

Sophy RickettObservation 951991/2013C-prints in a series of 6 (from a series of 10)30 x 30 cm x 6Edition of 5 + 2 AP£10,000 (available as a series of 10 only, excludingVAT, including London delivery and framing)Courtesy the artist and Grimaldi Gavin

Sophy RickettObservation 1231997/2013Silver gelatin print180 x 120 cmEdition of 5 + 2 AP£10,000 (excluding VAT, including London deliveryand framing)Courtesy the artist and Grimaldi Gavin

Philippe PleasantsOrford Ness, Suffolk2010Digital c-types on semi-matt photographic paper50.8 x 70 cm eachEdition of 8 + 1 AP£850 each, print only£995 each, framed as seen(excluding VAT, London delivery included)Courtesy the artist

Philippe PleasantsSolar Duration 3, Suffolk2011Digital c-types on semi-matt photographic paper 50.8 x 70 cm Edition of 8 + 1 AP£850 each, print only£995 each, framed as seen(excluding VAT, London delivery included)Courtesy the artist

Philippe PleasantsSolar Duration 5, Suffolk2011Digital c-types on semi-matt photographic paper50.8 x 70 cmEdition of 8 + 1 AP£850 each, print only£995 each, framed as seen(excluding VAT, London delivery included)Courtesy the artist

Philippe PleasantsTrace 4, London2011Digital c-types on semi-matt photographic paper50.8 x 70 cmEdition of 8 + 1 AP£850 each, print only£995 each, framed as seen(excluding VAT, London delivery included)Courtesy the artist

Philippe PleasantsTrace 3, London2011 Digital c-types on semi-matt photographic paper 50.8 x 70 cm Edition of 8 + 1 AP£850 each, print only£995 each, framed as seen(excluding VAT, London delivery included)Courtesy the artist

We Colonised the MoonAs Good as a Moonrock2012Display cabinet, artificial moon rock62 x 32 x 65 cm (cabinet)£3,750 (excluding VAT, including London delivery)Courtesy the artists and BERLONI Gallery

Martian hemisphereViking 1 Orbiter, June 1976Vintage chromogenic print, 20.2 x 25.4 cm [NASA S-76-27349], caption on verso£700 (excluding VAT)

Martian valley with canyon like featuresMariner 9, 1972Vintage gelatin silver print, 20.4 x 25.7 cm£500 (excluding VAT)

Martian sunsetViking Lander 1, August 1976Vintage chromogenic print, 20.4 x 25.5 cm£800 (excluding VAT)

Viking 1 Lander image of a Martian sunset over ChrysePlanitia. In this image the sun is 2 degrees below the localhorizon. The banding in the sky is an artefact produced bythe incremental brightness levels of the camera. This imagewas taken on the 30th Martian day (sol) after touchdown,at 19:13 local time. The camera is pointing towards thesouthwest.

The Martian SurfaceViking Orbiter, 1975Matt vintage gelatin silver print, 12.7 x 13.3 cm[JPL - VO75]£150 / £275 / £500 (1 / 2 / 4) (excluding VAT)

The Martian SurfaceViking Orbiter, 1975Matt vintage gelatin silver print, 12.7 x 13.3 cm[JPL - VO75]£150 / £275 / £500 (1 / 2 / 4) (excluding VAT)

Mars, the base of Olympus MonsMariner 9, 1972Vintage gelatin silver print, 26 x 20.5 cmNASA/JPL 75-H-529£600 (excluding VAT)

High-resolution view of Martian rocksViking 2 Lander, September 1976Vintage gelatin silver print, 20.2 x 25.4 cmNASA/JPL P-17687, caption on verso£600 (excluding VAT)

Panorama of the landing site just after touchdownViking 2 Lander, September 1976Vintage gelatin silver print, 20.2 x 25.4 cmNASA/JPL P-17682, caption on verso£800 (excluding VAT)

The Martian SurfaceViking Orbiter, 1975Matt vintage gelatin silver print, 12.7 x 13.3 cm[JPL - VO75]£150 / £275 / £500 (1 / 2 / 4) (excluding VAT)

The Martian SurfaceViking Orbiter, 1975Matt vintage gelatin silver print, 12.7 x 13.3 cm[JPL - VO75]£150 / £275 / £500 (1 / 2 / 4) (excluding VAT)

Solar flareSkylab 3, December 1973Vintage chromogenic print, 20.5 x 25.5 cmNASA/JPL S-74-15564£600 (excluding VAT)

Jupiter and its satellite IoVoyager 2, June 1979Vintage chromogenic print, 20.2 x 25.5 cmNASA/JPL 79-H-363, caption on verso£900 (excluding VAT)

NASA launched the two Voyager spacecraft to Jupiter, Saturn,Uranus, and Neptune in the late summer of 1977. Voyager 1'sclosest approach to Jupiter occurred March 5, 1979. Voyager2's closest approach was July 9, 1979.

Discovery of active volcanism on the satellite Io was probablythe greatest surprise. It was the first time active volcanoes hadbeen seen on another body in the solar system. It appearsthat activity on Io affects the entire Jovian system. Io appearsto be the primary source of matter that pervades the Jovianmagnetosphere, the region of space that surrounds theplanet, primarily influenced by the planet's strong magneticfield. Sulphur, oxygen, and sodium, apparently erupted by Io'svolcanoes and sputtered off the surface by impact of high-energy particles, were detected at the outer edge of themagnetosphere.

Crescent Earth from 10,000 milesApollo 4, November 1967Vintage chromogenic print, 20.3 x 25.4 cmNASA AS4-1-410, caption on verso£1,200 (excluding VAT)

Positioned in the capsule of the unmanned spacecraft, anautomatic 70mm Maurer camera took this beautiful view ofthe quarter crescent Earth from a distance of about 10,000miles. Apollo 4 was the first test flight of Wernher von Braun’scolossal three-stage Saturn V rocket destined for the Moon.

Mercury-Atlas 4, underwater view after splashdown 166 mileseast of BermudaMercury Atlas 4, 13 September 1961Large format vintage chromogenic print, 27.5 x 35.3 cm£750 (excluding VAT)

The unmanned spacecraft was the first Mercury craft to orbitthe earth. This underwater shows (from top to bottom) theflotation collar, deployed landing bag and the heat shield. Theleg and flipper of the US Navy frogman also visible. ACrewman Simulator package was aboard. The craft orbitedthe earth once, successfully completing its flight objectives.

Close-up view of the Lunar Module and flagApollo 14, February 1971Vintage chromogenic print, 20.2 x 25.4 cmNASA AS14-66-9277, caption on verso£800 (excluding VAT)

An excellent view of the Apollo 14 Lunar Module(LM) on the moon, as photographed during thefirst Apollo 14 extravehicular activity (EVA) on thelunar surface. The astronauts have alreadydeployed the U.S. flag. Note the laser rangingretro reflector (LR-3) at the foot of the LM ladder.The LR-3 was deployed later. While astronauts AlanB. Shepard Jr., commander, and Edgar D. Mitchell,lunar module pilot, descended in the LM toexplore the moon, astronaut Stuart A. Roosa,command module pilot, remained with theCommand and Service Modules (CSM) in lunarorbit.

William AndersEarthrise, the first-ever witnessed by human eyesApollo 8, December 1968Vintage gelatin silver print, 20.4 x 25.9 cm[AS8-14-2383], caption on verso£1,200 (excluding VAT)

The celebrated view of planet Earth appearing over thebleached lunar horizon. “There was nothing in the plan foran Earthrise photo. Indeed, we didn’t even see an actualEarthrise until, on our third orbit, we changed thespacecraft’s orientation to heads up and looking forward.As we came round the back side of the moon, where I hadbeen taking pictures of craters near our orbital track, Ilooked up and saw the startlingly beautiful sight of ourhome planet “rising” up above the stark and battered lunarhorizon. It was the only colour against the deep blacknessof space. In short, it was beautiful, and clearly delicate”.W. Anders

William AndersThe eastern hemisphere of the MoonApollo 8, December 1968Vintage chromogenic print, 20.2 x 25.4 cmNASA AS8-14-2505£900 (excluding VAT)

This frame is centred near Mare Smythii and lunar farsidefeatures occupy most of the right half of the picture.

The last lift-off from the MoonApollo 17, December 1972Vintage gelatin silver print, 20.6 x 25.4 cmNASA S-72-55422, caption on verso£600 (excluding VAT)

At 4.54 pm on Thursday 14 December 1972, after threedays on the Moon, the “Challenger” ascent state lifts offin this still from a colour transmission made by the RCATV camera mounted on the lunar roving vehicle. TheLunar Module descent stage was used as a launchplatform and remains on the Moon. At its foot the crewleft a letter which read: “Here man ended his explorationof the Moon, December 1972. May the spirit of peace, inthe name of which we came here, reflect upon the life ofall mankind.”

The Earth, a still from the live telecastApollo 8, December 1968Vintage gelatin silver print, 20.5 x 25.4 cmNASA 68-H-1413£600 (excluding VAT)

Apollo 12 Landing Back Up SiteOctober 1969 / Lunar Orbiter 3, 1967Vintage gelatin silver print, 25.3 x 20.4 cmS-69-54553£600 (excluding VAT)

If the Apollo 12 launch is postponed until Nov. 16, 1969, thelunar landing will be made in this area in the Sea of Storms.(The prime launch window is Nov. 14, 1969, at 11:22 a.m.(EST), landing at Site 7.) This site (Site 5) is located at 41degrees 40 minutes west longitude and 1 degree 40minutes north latitude. This photograph was taken byLunar Orbiter 3 on Feb. 21, 1967, at an altitude of 32 miles(51.8 kilometers) above the moon. This view is looking westwith the sun almost directly behind the spacecraft. Theseapproximates show the landing site as it will look to Apolloastronauts as they approach the site. The actual target siteis represented by the ellipse which measures three by fivemiles. The lines indicate coordinates on the moon near thetarget site.

Florida keys from orbitGemini 4, June 1965Vintage chromogenic print, 20.2 x 25.4 cmNASA S65-34766£600 (excluding VAT)

Neil ArmstrongBuzz Aldrin’s gold-plated visor reflects Armstrong andthe Lunar ModuleApollo 11, July 1969Vintage chromogenic print, 20.2 x 25.4 cmNASA AS11-40-5903, caption on verso£4,500 (excluding VAT)

“As I walked away from the Eagle lunar module, Neil said“Hold it, Buzz”. So I stopped and turned around, and thenhe took what has become know as the “Visor” photo. I likethis photo because it captures the moment of a solitaryfigure against the horizon of the moon, along with areflection in my helmet’s visor of our home away fromhome, the Eagle, and of Neil snapping the photo.”Buzz Aldrin

Copernicus crater on the Moon, from 28.4 milesLunar Orbiter 2, November 1966Vintage gelatin silver print, 20.2 x 25.4 cmNASA 66-H-1470, caption on verso£800 (excluding VAT)

The remarkable clarity is attributable to the absence ofatmosphere. “On first seeing this oblique view of the craterCopernicus I was awed by the sudden realisation that thisprominent lunar feature I have often viewed by telescope isa landscape of real mountains and valleys, obviouslyfashioned by tremendous forces of nature. It is no wonderthat some writers immediately classified it as the “Picture ofthe Year”” Oran W Nicks, NASA Office of Space Scienceand Applications

The Crater Schmidt, Sea of TranquilityApollo 10, May 1969Vintage gelatin silver print, 20.4 x 25.3 cm[NASA AS10-34-5162], caption on verso£600 (excluding VAT)

An Apollo 10 view of crater Schmidt which is located at thewestern edge of the Sea of Tranquility. Schmidt, which has adiameter of 7 statute miles, is also located just south of thecrater Ritter and immediately west of the crater Sabine. Thecoordinates of Schmidt are 18.8 degrees east longitude and1.2 degrees north latitude. The shadowed area is on theeast side of the crater.

Command and Service Module seen from the Lunar ModuleApollo 9, March 1969Vintage chromogenic print, 20.2 x 25.4 cmNASA AS9-24-3646£800 (excluding VAT)

Edgar MitchellAlan Shepard and the U.S. flagApollo 14, February 1971Vintage chromogenic print, 20.2 x 25.4 cmNASA AS14-66-9252, caption on verso£1,400 (excluding VAT)

The portrait of Shepard is framed by the shadows of theLunar Module, the S-band antenna and the photographer.“I look back now on the flights carrying Apollo 12 crew andmy crew as the real pioneering explorations of the Moon.Neil, Buzz, and Mike in Apollo 11 proved that man couldget to the moon and do useful scientific work, once he wasthere. Our two flights - Apollo 12 and 14 - proved thatscientists could select a target area and define a series ofobjectives, and that man could get there with precision andcarry out the objectives with relative ease and a very highdegree of success.” Alan Shepard

The Sea of Tranquility first seen by human eyesApollo 8, December 1968Vintage gelatin silver print, 20.5 x 25.4 cmNASA AS8-13-2344£800 (excluding VAT)

“My own impression is that it’s a vast, lonely, forbiddingtype of existence – a great expanse of nothing, that looksrather like clouds and clouds of pumice stone – and itcertainly would not appear to be a very inviting place tolive or work.” Frank Borman, live Apollo 8 telecast fromlunar orbit.

Wide-angle view of the far side of the MoonLunar Orbiter 5, August 1967Vintage gelatin silver print, 20.5 x 25.4 cm[NASA 67-H-1103], caption on verso£800 (excluding VAT)

Richard GordonThe illuminated Earth at a record-high altitude of 850 milesGemini 11, September 1966Vintage chromogenic print, 25.3 x 20.3 cmNASA S-66-54706, caption on verso£1,000 (excluding VAT)

Western half of Australia, including the coastline from Perthto Port Darwin, looking west, as seen from the Gemini-11spacecraft during its 26th revolution of Earth. Photographwas made while the spacecraft was at a record-highapogee of 740 nautical miles. Taken with a modified 70mmHasselblad camera, using Eastman Kodak, Ektachrome, MS(S.O. 368) color film.

David ScottJames Irwin and the Lunar RoverApollo 15, August 1971Vintage gelatin silver print, 20.2 x 25.4 cmNASA AS15-82-11168£800 (excluding VAT)

“I was surprised that time went so fast. We never hadenough time. And, boy, we had trained to make sure wewere efficient. And when we got there, we never hadenough time to explore a site like we would have liked to.Because it was so exciting. There was so much there. Andyou just wanted more and more and more and more…”David Scott

One of the footpads of Surveyor 3 which landed in 1967Apollo 12, November 1969Vintage gelatin silver print, 20.2 x 25.4 cm[NASA 69-H-1982], caption on verso£800 (excluding VAT)

The surveyor has three footpads, an arrangement thatincreased the chances the spacecraft would remain uprightno matter where it landed as long as the descent wasvertical. This is a view of the footpad from the south, withthe two imprints made during the landing. The scoop is inthe background.

James IrwinDavid Scott and the Lunar RoverApollo 15, August 1971Vintage gelatin silver print, 23.8 x 20.5 cm[NASA AS15-85-11451]£900 (excluding VAT)

Astronaut David R. Scott, mission commander, performs a taskat the Lunar Roving Vehicle parked on the edge of HadleyRille during the first Apollo 15 lunar surface extravehicularactivity (EVA). This photograph was taken by astronaut JamesB. Irwin, lunar module pilot, from the flank of St. GeorgeCrater. The view is looking north along the rille.

Measuring one mile across and 1,000 feet deep, the windingcanyon is littered with boulders and stretches for almost 80miles along the edge of the Marsh of Decay.

William AndersPlanet Earth seen from a point near the MoonApollo 8, December 1968Vintage chromogenic print, 19.5 x 25.3 cm[NASA AS8-16-2607]£900 (excluding VAT)

“The vast loneliness up here at the moon is awe-inspiring,and it makes you realize what you have back there onearth. The earth from here is a grand oasis in the bigvastness of space.” Jim Lovell, live Apollo 8 telecast fromlunar orbit.

Michael Collins and John Young in launch positionsGemini 10, July 1966Vintage gelatin silver print, 20.2 x 25.4 cmNASA 66-H-963, caption on verso£600 (excluding VAT)

James IrwinMount Hadley and St George CraterApollo 15, August 1971Vintage gelatin silver print, 20.2 x 25.4 cm[NASA AS15-82-11179]£900 (excluding VAT)

“It had a majestic feeling about it. And one says this aftertalking about how it’s dusty, it’s gray, nothing’s growing,nothing of any real beauty. But yet, take it all together withthe vastness of it, the sense of history, the boulders, andthe elevations we had on our flight and certainly some ofthe other flights, Hadley for example, it really is majestic, inthe sense of desolate mountain desert type of a setting.”Alan Shepard

Lunar boulders, St. George Crater beyondApollo 15, July 1971Vintage gelatin silver print, 20.2 x 25.4 cmNASA AS15-82-11147£900 (excluding VAT)

Hadley Delta is the mountain in the background and StGeorge Crater is partially visible in the upper right.

Command Module seen from the Lunar Module just afterseparationApollo 16, April 1972Vintage chromogenic print, 19.7 x 25.4 cmNASA AS16-113-18294£900 (excluding VAT)

The Apollo 16 Command and Service Modules (CSM), as seenfrom the Lunar Module (LM, out of view) above terrain on thelunar farside. The two spacecraft had just undocked. The LMand CSM were out of communication at the time of thisphotograph's exposure, but shortly acquired the signal as theymoved separately to Earth's side of the Moon. Whileastronauts John W. Young, commander; and Charles M. DukeJr., lunar module pilot, descended in the Apollo 16 LM "Orion"to explore the Descartes highlands landing site on the Moon,astronaut Thomas K. Mattingly II, command module pilot,remained with the CSM "Casper" in lunar orbit.

James McDivittEd White walking in space over HawaiiGemini 4, June 1965Vintage chromogenic print, 20.3 x 25.4 cmNASA S65-30431, caption on verso£1,000 (excluding VAT)

Flight pilot Edward H. White II during his twenty-minutespacewalk in the zero gravity of space, with 15 kg ofequipment on his back and attached to the spacecraft by a25-ft umbilical line and a 23-ft tether line, both wrapped ingold tape to form one cord. In his left hand White carries aHand-Held Self-Manoeuvering Unit - an oxygen-jet gun - witha camera mounted above. The visor of his helmet is gold-plated to protect him from the unfiltered rays of the sun.

Oblique view of the dark side of the MoonApollo 11, July 1969Vintage chromogenic print, 20.2 x 25.4 cmNASA AS11-44-6608, caption on verso£900 (excluding VAT)

The rough terrain in this photograph is typical of the farside ofthe moon. This lunar picture was taken from the Apollo 11spacecraft during the lunar landing mission. About one-half ofInternational Astronomical Union (I.A.U.) crater NO. 308 isvisible at upper right. The coordinates of the center of I.A.U.crater NO. 308 are 179.3 degrees east longitude and 6degrees south latitude. While astronauts Neil A. Armstrong,commander; and Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., lunar module pilot;descended in the Lunar Module (LM) "Eagle" to explore themoon, astronaut Michael Collins, command module pilot,remained with the Command and Service Modules (CSM) inlunar orbit.

Oblique low-sun view of the lunar surfaceApollo 10, May 1969Vintage gelatin silver print, 20.2 x 25.4 cmNASA AS10-27-3907, caption on verso£600 (excluding VAT)

Apollo 10 westward view across Apollo Landing Site 3 in theCentral Bay. Apollo Landing Site 3 is in the middle distance atthe left margin of the pronounced ridge in the left half of thephotograph. Bruce, the prominent crater, near the bottom ofthe scene, is about 6 kilometers (3.7 statute miles) in diameter.Topographic features on the surface of the Central Bay areaccentuated by the low sun angle. Sun angles range fromnear 6 degrees at the bottom of the photograph to less thanone degree at the top.

Mount HadleyApollo 15, August 1971Vintage chromogenic print, 20.2 x 25.4 cmNASA AS15-88-11918£800 (excluding VAT)

James McDivittEd White walking in space, the Earth limb beyondGemini 4, June 1965Vintage chromogenic print, 20.3 x 25.4 cmNASA S65-30432, caption on verso£1,200 (excluding VAT)

Astronaut Edward H. White II, pilot of the Gemini IV four-dayEarth-orbital mission, floats in the zero gravity of spaceoutside the Gemini IV spacecraft. White wears a speciallydesigned spacesuit; and the visor of the helmet is gold platedto protect him against the unfiltered rays of the sun. He wearsan emergency oxygen pack, also. He is secured to thespacecraft by a 25-feet umbilical line and a 23-feet tether line,both wrapped in gold tape to form one cord. In his right handis a Hand-Held Self-Maneuvering Unit (HHSMU) with which hecontrols his movements in space. Astronaut James A. McDivitt,command pilot of the mission, remained inside the spacecraft.Astronaut White died in the Apollo/Saturn 204 fire at CapeKennedy on Jan. 27, 1967.

Photomicrograph of sections of moon rock1970Vintage chromogenic print, 20.4 x 25.3 cmNASA S-70-49265£600 (excluding VAT)

The lunar surface from orbitApollo 14, January 1971Vintage gelatin silver print, 20.2 x 25.5 cmNASA AS14-70-9778£500 (excluding VAT)

A lunar boulderApollo 14, February 1971Vintage gelatin silver print, 20.2 x 25.4 cmNASA AS14-68-9451£800 (excluding VAT)

A close-up view of a large boulder in a field of boulders nearthe rim of Cone Crater, which was photographed by theApollo 14 moon-explorers during the mission's secondextravehicular activity (EVA). Astronauts Alan B. Shepard Jr.,commander, and Edgar D. Mitchell, lunar module pilot,descended in the Apollo 14 Lunar Module (LM) to explore thelunar surface while astronaut Stuart A. Roosa, commandmodule pilot, remained with the Command and ServiceModules (CSM) in lunar orbit.

dark frame / deep field

Written by Marek Kukula and Melanie Vandenbrouck

We’ve come to the conclusion that this has been far more than three men on avoyage to the Moon … this stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of allmankind to explore the unknown.Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11 crew TV broadcast, 23 July 1963)

Art has always played a vital role in our exploration of the universe. The greatconceptual revolution of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries, when the Sunreplaced the Earth at the centre of the cosmos, was closely allied to ideas ofharmony and simplicity in nature derived from Renaissance art: when Copernicusset the Earth in motion, he was responding to an aesthetic imperative as much asa scientific one. Galileo’s ground-breaking observation of the Moon, Venus andJupiter, which provided empirical support for Copernicus’ thesis, were conveyedto the public as much by the beauty of his illustrations as by the power of hiswords. So the development of astronomical knowledge has always gone hand-in-hand with a need to visualise that knowledge. Astronomers took up art and laterphotography (as a way of capturing visible light), to produce records of the nightsky, the surface of the Moon and the Sun, while artists became amateurastronomers. And it is not, therefore, so huge a leap to follow Albert Einstein’sclaim that “the greatest scientists are always artists as well,” for, as he remarked in1923, “after a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tendto coalesce in aesthetics, plasticity, and form”.(1) Today, telescopes and spacecraftsend back images which are arguably just as powerful in their aesthetic impact asin their scientific content, but it is perhaps artists who are best equipped tointerpret what these dispatches tell us about our place in a cosmos in which weseem ever smaller and less significant. In dark frame / deep field, six contemporaryartists explore the limits of our ability to image, map and define the universe, withartworks displayed alongside vintage photographs from NASA, from the era inwhich the breath-taking scale of outer space was first brought into view.

(1) Remark made in 1923, recalled by Archibald Henderson,Durham Morning Herald, August 21, 1955; Einstein Archive33-257.

The authors would like to acknowledge the kind support andadvice of Katy Barrett, Ben Burbridge, Andrew Gregory, ChrisLintott, and, last but not least the artists shown in thisexhibition, and the gallery’s directors, Josephine Breese andHenry Little.

The title of dark frame / deep field references a central dichotomy in astronomyand, by extension, in science in general. Since the invention of the telescope fourcenturies ago our observations of the cosmos have fundamentally changed theway we perceive ourselves – and yet we are an integral part of the universe weare trying to observe, and so at every stage we inevitably impose our currentpreconceptions and preoccupations onto the model that we piece together. Asthe physicist Werner Heisenberg pointed out, human language is often ill-suitedto describe the extreme micro- and macro-worlds that science reveals, forcing usto employ analogy and metaphor, even in scientific papers. Heisenberg went onto observe that “fortunately, mathematics is not subject to this limitation” and oneof the questions posed (but surely not answered) by this exhibition is to whatextent this might also be true of art.(2)

A dark frame is a digital blank – a photograph taken without exposing the camerachip to light, in order to reveal the flaws and variations in detector sensitivity thatare intrinsic to the chip itself. It is almost the opposite of an astronomicalobservation since it involves blocking all aspects of the external world from view,and yet the dark frame is an essential component in the creation of manyastronomical images – as explored in the work by fine art photographer WolfgangTillmans illustrated to the left. It reminds us that there is no such thing as absoluteobjectivity, even in the ultra-technical field of scientific photography. Every act oflooking, or of recording light, involves the imprinting of aspects of the observeronto the thing which is being observed, or at least onto its image. These“artefacts” need to be measured and their effects understood in order for theastronomer to be able to remove them, thus returning the image to as close anapproximation of the original as possible. But, as the second law ofthermodynamics tells us, the process of restoration can never be perfect. Indeed,in some cases the artefacts themselves become an intrinsic part of the way weread and interpret the image. The cross-like diffraction spikes which often adornphotographic images of stars are a result of the way light passes through theoptics of a reflecting telescope but, despite the fact that the unaided human eyewill never see a star this way, our familiarity with photographic representations of

(2) Werner Heisenberg, The Physical Principles of theQuantum Theory, 1930, p. 11.

Wolfgang Tillmans, sensor flaws and dead pixels, ESO, 2012,in the collection of the National Maritime Museum,Greenwich, London, © the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley,London.

the sky means that these spikes are now part of how we expect the stars to look –and they feature in everything from sci-fi CGI effects to Christmas-card depictionsof the Star of Bethlehem.

Deep-field observations have long been a powerful exploratory tool inastronomy, isolating a region of the sky for intensive study in much the same waythat an archaeologist might mark out regions of the landscape for excavation. Inthis sense “field” is a very terrestrial metaphor, referencing the apparent two-dimensionality of the sky (and the actual two-dimensionality of the photographicimage) and the way that the imaging process necessarily imposes a boundary oredge around the region studied. It also suggests that the image thus obtained islike a landscape – an analogy between the cosmos and Earth-bound features thatrecurs across NASA imagery. Furthermore, the deep field epitomises anotheraspect of astronomical photography: the representation of extended periods oftime as well as extended regions of space. In a sense, photography offers us thesame counterintuitive distortion of dimensions as the warping of spacetime inAlbert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (1915): a photograph removes thethird dimension of space, compressing a view into a two dimensional plane, but itsimultaneously adds an additional dimension – that of time – due to the necessityof a finite exposure length.

Unlike the eye, the camera can expose for an extended period of time and thisproperty is exaggerated in astronomical photography, in which exposure times ofminutes, hours or days are common, gathering and intensifying the faint light ofdistant objects and thus rendering them visible. A further temporal element isgiven by the fact that astronomical objects are so far away. Because of the hugedistances involved and the finite – often extremely long – times that it takes lightto traverse them, we see distant objects as they were hundreds, thousands,millions, even billions of years in the past, when their light first set out towards us.The telescope is therefore a time machine, allowing us to look directly into thepast: our view of the Moon is already 1.2 seconds old, the Sun is 8 minutes oflight-travel time away and we see the Andromeda Galaxy as it was 2.5 million

years ago. While the essence of photography is to capture light and thus makean instantaneous record of a scene, astronomical photographs are by their naturerecording time as well as space.

This opening up of the depths of the sky was one of the most revolutionaryconsequences of the invention of photography in the nineteenth century. Overthe last few decades the advent of digital camera chips, with their exquisitesensitivity and fidelity, has resulted in further leaps in the capabilities of deep-fieldastronomy. Perhaps the most famous products of this photographic renaissancecome from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990: the HubbleDeep Field (1995) and its successors the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (2005) andHubble eXtreme Deep Field (2012).(3) These images, each representing aninvestment of several days’ worth of exposure on one of the most expensiveresearch facilities ever built, are simultaneously scientific treasure troves andcultural icons. Covering a region of the sky that, seen from Earth, is no larger thana grain of salt held at arms’ length, each one is effectively a tunnel bored into thefarthest reaches of the universe - and back through almost 13 billion years ofcosmological time - revealing thousands of galaxies in various stages of evolutionand allowing us a glimpse of the processes that shaped our own origins.

The Hubble Deep Fields are the latest in a long line of iconic space photographsnotable for both their scientific value and their popular appeal – an appeal whichhas not escaped the notice of observatories and space agencies. Indeed,substantial effort is now invested by these organisations in the production ofaesthetically pleasing images for public and media consumption. For example, theHubble Heritage Project, founded in 1998 in the wake of the discovery andsubsequent correction of the telescope’s initial focussing problems, takes scientificdata from the Hubble archive and reprocesses them, removing artefacts,combining monochrome frames to produce full-colour images and applying rulesof colour, shape, line and framing derived from formalist theories of art.(4) Sosuccessful has this approach proved that the project has been granted reservedtime on the telescope itself, to obtain new data purely for PR rather than scientific

(3) The Hubble Ultra Deep Field was expanded in 2005, andfurther supplemented in 2009 using infrared channels. Therefined version of the Ultra-Deep Field, dubbed the eXtremeDeep Field in 2012 was re-released (as Hubble Ultra-DeepField) in 2014 with an image composed of, for the first time,the full range of ultraviolet to near-infrared light.

(4) Hubble Heritage Project: http://heritage.stsci.edu/

reasons. But such hybrid art/science/PR initiatives are hardly new. When, in the1960s, NASA circulated to the public the first documentary and scientificphotographs taken from space, they brought the alien and distant into starkproximity with the mundane. With the goose bump-inducing Earthrise (1968), inwhich the Earth is seen majestically appearing over the Moon’s barren horizon,Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders captured the emotional impact of the SpaceRace: allowing us to reflect on the beauty, frailty and unicity of our planet and ourplace within the universe.

Long before the Apollo missions and the Hubble Heritage Project, pioneeringAmerican photographer Berenice Abbott had advocated the power ofphotography to make science intelligible to a general audience, with itsrevelations of a reality that is inaccessible to the unaided human senses. In herinfluential 1939 manifesto, “Science and Photography”, Abbott wrote: “we live in aworld made by science. But we – the millions of laymen – do not understand orappreciate the knowledge which thus controls daily life. To obtain wide popularsupport for science, to that end we may explore this vast subject even further andbring as yet unexplored areas under control. There needs to be a friendlyinterpreter between science and the laymen. […]Today science needs its voice. Itneeds the vivification of the visual image, the warm human quality of imaginationadded to its austere and stern disciplines. It needs to speak to the people in termsthey will understand.’(5) As she later summarised, ‘[photography was] the mediumpre-eminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in theyears which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art.’(6)Likewise, as highlighted in the Science Museum’s recent exhibition, Revelations:Experiments in Photography (2015), for painter and art theorist György Kepes, “therole of the artist was to help society make sense of a world transformed byscience and technology”.(7)

William Anders, Earthrise, the first ever witnessed by humaneyes, Apollo 8, December 1968, Vintage chromogenic print,20.2 x 25.4 cm, NASA AS8-14-2383.

(5) Berenice Abbott, “Photography and Science”, 1939,reproduced in Ron Kurtz (ed.), Berenice Abbott: DocumentingScience, 2012, p. 6.

(6) Berenice Abbott, “The Image of Science”, Art in America,47, no. 4 (Winter 1959).

(7) Exhibition interpretation text for Revelations: Experimentsin Photography, Science Museum, 2015.

Despite C.P. Snow’s 1959 warning about the “Two Cultures” of science and thehumanities, art and science have never entirely severed their historic connections.Increasingly, it is engagement and collaboration rather than mutualincomprehension that is defining the relationship between these two aspects ofhuman cultural expression.(8) Contemporary artists are finding a rich territory ofideas and meaning through engagement with science, while such collaborationalso opens a fresh field of vision for scientists themselves, allowing them to look attheir subject with new perspectives and insights. In 2012, Sophy Rickett wasAssociate Artist at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, where shemet retired astrophysicist Dr Roderick Willstrop. Between 1987 and 1989, Willstrophad devised the Three Mirror Telescope (3MT), allowing for a wider field of viewthan had been previously possible in one- or two-mirror telescopes, and therebyincreasing the amount of data that could be captured in a single image.(9) Usingthis instrument, Willstrop produced 125 black and white film negatives before 3MTwas modified to capture digital images in 1991. Rendered obsolete by fast-advancing technology, few of the film negatives were ever printed until Rickettrescued them from oblivion.

At the cusp of collaboration and appropriation, Rickett describes her interactionwith Willstrop’s work as a “blurred authorship”, where “different voices, differentpoints in time, merged together”, although, she qualifies, “we are not occupyingthe same ground, and there is a kind of resistance between us and the work thatwe do”.(10) Engaging with these forgotten negatives at an aesthetic level, revealedin the blackness of the darkroom just as nightfall becomes the time of theastronomer, Rickett manipulated the selection of images that form the basis of herObjects in the Field project (2013) (see pp 28 - 29). The title of the seriesappropriates the language of astrophysics, where stars are “objects” and the “field”is the sky, but also makes explicit the way we map landscapes onto the sky as ananalogy for our experience of the world on Earth: we look out to deep space, butmake sense of it by grounding it on Earth. Scientific exactitude however remainsin Rickett’s interpretation: indeed, she retained Willstrop’s factual information bylabelling each of her prints with the part of the sky photographed and exposure

(8) Charles Percy Snow, The Two Cultures and the ScientificRevolution, 1959.

(9) Willstrop explains the mechanics of the 3MT in a darkframe / deep field interview with super / collider in May 2015:http://www.super-collider.com/publishing/mirrormirror/

(10) Interview in Photoparley blog, 3 December 2013,https://photoparley.wordpress.com/category/sophy-rickett/

time, as well as the date of the original observation, finally adding the date of theprint she produced in the darkroom. Artist and scientist use the same instrument,the lens, their understanding coalescing, Rickett says, on the subject ofphotographic processes and vision. Poignantly, this optical convergence has afurther, personal, resonance. She recalls, as a child, the experience of herdeteriorating eyesight as “the world shrinking around me”, and the revelationbrought by her first spectacles: “I put my new glasses on and for the first time Ican see clearly beyond the middle distance. […] It is all connected, one organism,but made up of a million shades of colour, inflections of movement”.(11) With thetelescope, invented by the spectacle-maker Hans Lippershey in 1608, the universealso expands on a dizzying scale – as Galileo and his successors discovered.

Observation 123 shows the comet Hale-Bopp (C1995/01), captured on film with anexposure of 20 minutes on 31 March 1997, shortly before 3MT was eventuallytaken out of service (see pp 30 - 31). Displayed as a negative, the black cometdetaches itself from the white background of the night sky, a negative/positiveinversion commonly used in astronomical imagery, as it allows the eye todistinguish the observed objects more clearly. But the pristine, almost clinical,background surrounding the circular image evokes medical sciences, the cellularlevel of the Petrie dish, more than astronomy: in a reversal of scales, the circularfield becomes a blown-up cell culture speckled with black dots. This affinitybetween the infinitesimally small and the infinitely large is not in itselfcontradictory. It was the invention of the microscope and the telescope in theseventeenth-century which simultaneously opened up vistas of micro- andmacro-scales, striking a blow at comfortable notions of human significance,throwing into question Protagoras’ assertion that ‘man is the measure of allthings.’

All astronomical imaging involves a process of framing, establishing boundariesaround what is otherwise infinite. Usually in scientific photography theseboundaries are imposed by the rectangular form of the photographic plate or thedigital imaging chip. But with their circular format Willstrop/Rickett’s prints remind

(11) Sophy Rickett, Objects in the Field, pamphlet producedfor the exhibition ‘Objects in the Field’, Kettle’s Yard,Cambridge, 2013, p. 3.

us of the original circular field of view of the telescope itself – or perhaps of thehuman eye. From a distance, these round images even seem to acquire a degreeof three dimensionality, recalling small planets and moons or the marbles childrentoss about in the playground. In Observation 95 (in ten parts) (1991/2013), arepeated image of the dwarf planet Pluto lost among a scattering of backgroundstars, Rickett lends a jewel-like quality to Willstrop’s negative, the bright colours ofthe individual frames transforming the sky into a series of exuberant gems: ruby,sapphire, emerald or amethyst (see pp 30 - 31). Astronomical imaging is initiallymonochromatic, and subsequently colourised to make sense of the data. Early on,the French photographer Léon Gimpel created colour stereoscopic images of theMoon using the anaglyphic method, to bring the geology of Earth’s satellite intosharper relief.(12) Today, the palette with which NASA scientists chose to representthe data captured by the Hubble Space Telescope owes as much to artisticconsideration as it does to science: it reveals the composition of stars and galaxiesbut is also eye-catching, and is, as art historian Elisabeth Kessler argues,determined by the scientists’ own cultural references to the aesthetic of an awe-inspiring American “sublime”.(13) Incidentally, the spectrum of colours Rickettchose for Observations 95 uses this “Hubble palette”, sampled from the so-calledPillars of Creation, the famous image of the Eagle Nebula M16, a star nursery6,500 light-years away from us, caught by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995.(14)

Every photograph is a record of the past, a time that has lapsed and no longerthere, but in astrophotography this record is doubled: the moment in which thephotograph was taken, and the time – many years earlier – at which the light firstset out towards us. Rickett’s work makes both these epochs explicit, juxtaposingastronomical deep time with history on a more human scale by resurrectingastronomical photographs which, although they are only a few decades old, arealready technologically obsolete. Giving life to image data that had beendiscarded, Rickett unearths the archaeology of astronomy itself.

(12) Gimpel’s most famous anaglyph of the Moon wasobtained by assembling two shots taken from the largeequatorial telescope at the Paris Observatory, on 9 May 1897and 7 February 1900.

(13) Elizabeth Kessler, Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble SpaceTelescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime, 2012.

(14) Tom Jeffreys, “Objects in the Field”, in The Learned Pig,20 February 2014, http://www.thelearnedpig.org/objects-in-the-field/. NASA’s Pillars of Creation was taken by Jeff Hesterand Paul Scowen on 1 April 1995, and imaged again with anupdated palette in 2015.

The Eagle Nebula M16, Hubble Space Telescope, 1995

As the history of exploration shows time and again, human nature contains anurge to domesticate the unknown and to lay claim to alien worlds, not justphysically but also intellectually. According to Michael Light, in the late 1960s andearly 1970s, “the [Apollo] program marshalled the full extent of human powers ofmeasuring, organizing, testing, quantifying, navigating, sampling, and exploring,and focused them intensely on a famously elusive and difficult goal”.(15) WeColonised the Moon (Sue Corke and Hagen Betzwieser) takes the flip side of that,injecting elements of playfulness – a rare quality when looking at the astronomical– and a degree of healthy questioning into this endeavour. As the writer DouglasAdams demonstrated in The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy (originally broadcastby the BBC as a radio comedy in 1978), humour can be a surprisingly serious toolfor engaging with the inhuman scale of space. Corke and Betzwieser deploy it tosimilar effect, shining a spotlight on Neil Armstrong’s “small step” and the politicaldimensions of the Apollo space programme.

In bold colours, the silkscreen prints Frigoris and Tranquillitatis (2012) re-appropriate lunar cartographic data from the US Geological Survey to queryhumanity’s claims on Earth’s satellite (see pp 26 - 27). The original maps wereproduced in advance of the lunar expeditions, and, significantly, MareTranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility) was the site chosen for the historic landing ofApollo 11’s Lunar Module “Eagle”. We Colonised the Moon have altered the maps’colourised data by emphasising their saturation. The “pop” treatment thusachieved reflects the euphoria that surrounded the first Moon landing, and how itwas crystallised in popular culture and art. Indeed, the astronauts became idols ofcelebrity-hungry, technology-driven Pop Art. In the 1960s, Robert Rauschenbergextensively used space imagery, most notably NASA’s PR-driven photographs.Andy Warhol, the quintessential artist of the Space Age, painted the walls of hisFactory silver in 1964, explaining that “silver was the future, it was spacey – theastronauts…”.(16) In one of his last works, Moonwalk, produced in 1987, the year ofthe artist’s death, Warhol immortalised (if such a need there was) Apollo 11’s“Buzz” Aldrin. The lively colours of We Colonised the Moon’s prints stand in directcontrast to the relentlessly ashen tones of the actual lunar landscape, but they

(15) Michael Light, “The Skin of the Moon”, in Full Moon,1999, unpaginated.

(16) Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The WarholSixties, 1980, p. 83.

cleverly evoke the palpable excitement of the astronauts. This is evident in NASAfootage and recordings of the period, brought back to public attention in AlReinert’s 1989 documentary For All Mankind, in particular the memorable scene inwhich the otherwise notoriously serious Apollo 17 “Moonwalkers” (and last-men-on-the-Moon) Eugene A. Cernan and Harrisson “Jack” Schmitt spontaneouslybreak into a song and bound about, giddy with joy (or was it with oxygen?).(17)

The US exploration of the Moon, a reaching out to the “next frontier”, unavoidablyreferences the conquest of the American West. The iconic paintings andphotographs produced by American artists in the late nineteenth century were asmuch an inventory, a record of ownership, as they were works of art. By the sametoken, the US Geological Survey maps, reinterpreted by We Colonised the Moon,evoke the politics of the Moon. Not only did the US make a claim on the Moon bymapping it, but from the moment humans set foot on its soil, the Moonirrevocably became a place, rather than a distant light in the sky; a place in whichthe Americans were the first (and, to this day, only) humans to walk. Indeed, as anostensibly peaceful response to the nuclear arms race, the Space Race (1955–72)is inextricably linked to politics. Through the height of the Cold War to its detente,the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions – which some have described asPresident JF Kennedy’s vanity project - were a response to the USSR getting theupper hand with Sputnik in the 1950s.(18) What could overshadow theachievement of sending the first spacecraft, dog, man, woman even, into orbit,but to reach the next frontier - not only to circumnavigate the Moon, but to stepon it and erect the Star Spangled Banner on its plains?

While the Moon perhaps does not hold the same strategic significance it oncedid, the implications of its uses remain largely political. In 1969, the Apolloastronauts left a number of retroreflectors on its surface, which are still used todayto make precise measurements of the distance between the Earth and the Moon(somewhat astonishingly, this is increasing by 3.78 centimetres every year due totidal interactions between the two bodies). More sinister, however, is the NSA’s useof these reflectors for “moonbounce” surveillance, as revealed by Trevor Paglen’s

(17) In addition to Reinert’s documentary, several recordingsof the period, some more poignant than others, wererecently brought back to popular culture by the Britishalternative group Public Service Broadcasting with their 2015album, The Race for Space.

(18) Andrew Smith, Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fellto Earth, 2005 [reprint 2009], 133.

They Watch the Moon (2010), “capturing communications and telemetry fromaround the world as they escape into space, hit the moon, and are reflected backtowards Earth”.(19) And if no one has strolled its plains since 1972, probes continueto impinge on its territories, such as the “Jade Rabbit” rover sent by the ChineseLunar Exploration Programme in 2013, as China establishes itself as a spacefaringpower. While the 1967 Outer Space Treaty ensures that no country may “own” theMoon (or other extra-terrestrial territories) nor use her for military purposes,Earth’s satellite could be seen as being as much at the centre of space politics asthe Arctic is now at the centre of terrestrial politics.(20) And as the exploration ofouter space continues, we are now extending our reach to the other planets andmoons of the solar system, albeit vicariously via the images and data beamedback by probes.

No less thought-provoking, is We Colonised the Moon’s As Good as a Moonrock(2012), a replica lunar boulder made of plaster, chicken wire and reconstructedmoon dust (the NASA-sanctioned lunar regolith simulant “JSC Lunar-1A” – bydecree, no individual, not even the Apollo astronauts, is allowed to own “real”moon dust) (see pp 42 - 43) (21). As the artists describe it, their “moonrock” maybe “humble” but its surface is “officially, as good as the real thing”.(22) Howeverartfully realised, there is something DIY and playful about the piece (it even comeswith its own repair kit). To be sure, the “moonrock” has a life of its own: it has beenseen, alternatively, propped on a stand, or casually resting at the bottom of itscase. Might the rock react to its “big sister”, as Sue Corke muses, and “weighfractionally less and temporarily levitate off its support when the Moon passesoverhead”?(23)

Yet, with its pseudo-vintage vitrine and brass label, As Good as a Moonrock usesthe high-brow rhetoric of traditional museum display, which lends it an aura ofauthenticity. In doing so, it at once questions conventional methods ofclassification and alludes to the conspiracy theories about whether or not thelunar expeditions really took place. Behind glass, the rock looks like somethingHG Well’s First Men in the Moon (1901) would have been proud to display in their

(19) Trevor Paglen’s website,http://www.paglen.com/?l=work&s=theywatchthemoon. Byway of contrast, another artist, Katie Paterson, has used theprinciple of “moonbounce” for more harmless endeavours,with her Earth-Moon-Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected fromthe Surface of the Moon), 2007.

(20) The Outer Space Treaty is also known as the “Treaty onPrinciples Governing the Activities of States in the Explorationand Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and OtherCelestial Bodies”, and lays the basis of international spacelaws. The political discussions around the Arctic, coordinatedvia the Arctic Council, are concerned about boundaries,sovereignty and defence, resource development, shippingroutes, and environmental protection.

(21) Smith, Moondust, p. 171. Lunar regolith is also highlycorrosive and, fine like powder, cuts like glass.

(22) We Colonised the Moon’s website, exhibition page forAuthentic Goods from a Realistic Future at EB&Flow gallery,London, 2012,http://www.wecolonisedthemoon.com/index.php/work/authentic-goods.html.

(23) Email conversation with Sue Corke, 18 June 2015.

drawing room. Indeed, it is not unlike the geological specimens the Victorianpolymath John Ruskin collected, being an avid observer of nature and gatherer offossils and mineral samples, some of which can be found in unexpected places,such as the delightful Cawthorne Victoria Jubilee Museum in South Yorkshire.

But there is a difference between mud-larking or picking up specimens on theseashore, and harvesting rocks 400,000 kilometres away from home. By beingpresented as a precious object, of the kind found in humanists’ and collectors’cabinets of curiosity since the Renaissance, As Good as a Moonrock reminds usthat the actual rocks brought back from the Moon are priceless – so much so thatsome of them have been the object of theft. Most of the pieces gathered by theApollo missions are kept at the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility in Houston andat White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico but under the Nixonadministration “goodwill moon rocks” from the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 missionswere distributed to 135 countries and 50 US states. Many of these samples aretoday unaccounted for, and, as it turns out, other such diplomatic “moon rocks”are even fakes, like the one given to former Dutch leader Willem Drees in 1969and now displayed at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. (It is this particularspecimen that inspired We Colonised the Moon’s own rock).

But if we can recreate the Moon for ourselves, down to its rocks and its smell (asindeed We Colonised the Moon have done in 2010, with their Moon: Scratch andSniff), have we reached the point where we don’t need the Moon anymore?Despite this ambiguity, the Moon’s continuing relevance is attested by recentexhibitions Republic of the Moon (Arts Catalyst, Liverpool and London, 2011–14)and They Used to Call it the Moon (Baltic, Newcastle, 2014), and director DuncanJones’ film, Moon (2009).

Another piece that looks like the Moon but isn’t, is Caroline Corbasson’s Crater(2013), which harks back to the tradition of astronomical drawing as the main wayof recording observations and putting discoveries into an intelligible, visual form(see pp 20 - 21). While it is in fact a depiction of a 50,000 year-old impact feature

in Arizona, the subject matter, medium and mood of the piece inevitably invokesearly observational sketches of the Moon: Galileo’s delicate drawings, among thefirst made via telescopic observation in 1609, or the vibrant pastels of the RoyalAcademician John Russell, one of the eighteenth century’s leading portraitists, aswell as a keen amateur astronomer. The confusion between Earth and Moon inCorbasson’s work is deliberate: “I wanted … to cover my tracks with high contrastand the absence of colours”, she says.(24)

However exquisitely drawn, there is a primeval quality to Crater. The most humbleof all media, drawing is among the first means of expression used by children, thefirst known form of art, to be found on the walls of prehistoric caves, and the firsttechnique taught in art schools.(25) Significantly, the artist’s chosen materialresonates with the work’s content: Crater is drawn in charcoal, as if recalling thesoot deposits left by global wildfires after the meteorite impact which caused theextinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. As a form of carbon, charcoalalso embodies the element essential for organic chemistry and therefore for life,but carbon itself is an alien substance, synthesised inside stars and delivered tothe young Earth by comet and asteroid impacts: to repeat Carl Sagan’s famousaphorism, “we are all made of starstuff”. In a final cosmic parallel, as he steppedoff the Eagle Lunar Module’s ladder, first-man-on-the-moon Neil Armstrongdescribed the lunar soil thus: “the surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it uploosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to thesole and sides of my boots.”(26)

And indeed, it is impossible to look at Crater without thinking of NASA’s earlyphotographic moonscapes: the dramatically shadowed cavity is eerily similar toCrater Schmidt, Sea of Tranquillity, as pictured by Apollo 10 in 1969 (see pp 90 –91), while the white diagonal on the eighth paper sheet of Crater (actually ahighway across the Arizona desert), evokes the lines of longitude and latitudesuperimposed on photographs taken by the Lunar Orbiter III in 1967 (see pp 82 –83). The large scale of Corbasson’s polyptych, deployed over nine panels, recallsthe composite lunar landscape panoramas taken by various Apollo missions,

(24) Caroline Corbasson, Observatoire, 2015, interview withMakis Malafékas, June 2013, p. 74.

(25) Corbasson herself says: “I’ve been drawing since I wasvery little, since I was able to hold a pencil”, as above, p. 74.

(26) Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal,http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.step.html, 109:24:48.

many of which were brought to the public’s knowledge thanks to Michael Light’s1999 exhibition and book, Full Moon. But, as Light puts it, ‘a landscape is alandscape, whether made on Earth, the Moon or Mars.’(27) It should come as nosurprise therefore that when Corbasson first showed Crater to one of theresearchers who had advised her on her astronomy-inspired work, it was Marsthat this monumental drawing conjured up.(28) But the sharp shadows of theblack and white world she draws are closer to a place in which there is noatmosphere to soften edges and the light cast by the burning rays of the Sun.Second Moonwalker Aldrin spoke of the “magnificent desolation” of the Moon,and Corbasson’s dramatic chiaroscuro has that sense of stillness of the lifeless,airless, silent satellite, a world in which only shadows move.(29)

Crater gives material sense to light, which seems to radiate from, as much as itfalls, onto the landscape, while the ductility of the heavy-grained paper andpowdery charcoal grants a sculptural aura to the piece. Corbasson’s Naked Eye(2014), a meticulous layering of star maps taken from the SmithsonianAstrophysical Observatory star atlas of reference stars and non-stellar objects(1969), is equally deceptive in its three-dimensional feel (see pp 22 - 23). Theartist’s borrowing from earlier, painstaking mapping material, recalls the way thatphotographic plates from the Astrographic Catalogue and the never completedCarte du Ciel, were resurrected through the European Space Agency’s HipparcosCatalogue in 1997. Initiated in 1887 by the Paris Observatory, the AstrographicCatalogue and Carte du Ciel were international projects to which twentyobservatories around the world contributed. This collaborative endeavour aimedto map the entire sky and catalogue the position of millions of stars down tomuch fainter levels than the eye can detect. By way of contrast, the Smithsonian’sstar atlas was intended for lay users as well as professional astronomers andalthough the objects listed go well beyond those visible to the unaided eye, theyare within range of amateur telescopes, making this a very egalitarian renderingof the sky. (Hedging its scientific bets, the Smithsonian’s star atlas even declaresitself to be ‘a convenient tool for any astrologer.’)

(27) Light, ‘The Skin of the Moon,’, as above.

(28) Adrien Denèle, “Inspirée par les astres”, Ciel et Espace,September 2013, p. 45.

(29) Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal, as above, 109:43:24. It issignificant that one of the topics that recurs the most duringthis first exploration of the Moon is that of the beauty of thelandscape.

With Naked Eye, Corbasson seems to transform the flat cartography of the skyinto a three-dimensional simulation of the entire universe, recalling the way thatthe Hubble Space Telescope evoked depth and three-dimensionality in its variousdeep field images, with their thousands of galaxies stretching away. Both generatea sense of gazing into an almost infinite distance. Thus, while Crater conjures up aworld which was physically explored through six landings between 1969 and 1972,Naked Eye evokes a more remote interaction with space, image-making at thevery edge of visibility. Yet there is a distinctively traditional approach to Naked Eye,through Corbasson’s use of printmaking, a medium which was for a long time themain way of communicating science, after Johannes Gutenberg’s momentousintroduction of the printed press in the Western world in the fifteenth century. InNaked Eye, the luscious ink, almost standing out in relief, makes the shimmeringblack stars on their pristine background look close and remote at once.

A similar reversal of values is at play in Dan Holdsworth’s Blackout 13 (2010), fromthe eponymous series shot at the Sólheimajökull glacier in Iceland (see pp 24 -25). Holdsworth defies perceptions, transmuting positive into negative, the earthlyinto otherworldly. The daytime sky becomes an inscrutable black, the sootymountain, naturally darkened by the ashes of nearby volcanoes, turned an eerie,almost translucent white. If a sense of stillness emanates from these works, theBlackout series also evokes catastrophes on human, geological and environmentalscales – the 1965 New York blackout, the violence of a land where volcanoes eruptand tectonic plates tear the earth apart, and global climate change. In hisdystopian landscapes, Holdsworth presents the Earth itself as an alien object,turning an astronomical eye back towards our own planet. Barren andsupernatural, the Blackout landscapes are at once hauntingly beautiful andachingly nostalgic: they speak of the romantic sublime as much as of NASAimagery. Devoid of human presence, with no familiar features like trees, electricpoles or buildings in sight, scale becomes impossible to gauge, narrative fails, liferemains absent.

By presenting us with the paradox of an illuminated “daytime” landscape under arelentlessly black sky, Holdsworth metaphorically strips away the Earth’s life-givingatmosphere - arguably the component of our planet that separates us mostemphatically from other solar system bodies. Once back on Earth, theMoonwalkers reminisced about the extraordinary experience of staring into anink-black sky in daytime. For Apollo 16’s Charles Duke, “it was a texture, theblackness was so intense”. Beyond the surreal quality of the sky, Holdsworth’shyper-clear, mostly colourless image conjures the experience of being on theMoon, where the absence of air grants sharper focus to any object encountered.And there is a crispness, a subtlety of volume and richness of light, in Blackout 13that only analogue photography can achieve, still: even the unfathomableblackness seems to have a consistency, a haptic quality, which recalls Duke’sexclamation. Crowned by obscurity, the mass of white and soft greyness of theglacier looks uncannily like the slopes of the Moon in the shots taken on MountHadley by Apollo 15’s David Scott and James Irwin (see pp 112 - 113 and pp 124 –125). Scott’s description of the scene, could easily apply to Holdsworth’slandscapes: "These mountains were never quickened by life, never assailed bywind or rain, they loom still and serene, a tableau forever. Their majestyoverwhelms me".(30)

It is noteworthy that Icelandic glaciers, rich in basalt, were used for NASA geologyfield trips in preparation for the Moon landings: basaltic soil, comparatively rareon Earth’s surface, is found across the solar system. But even more remote worldsare brought to mind. As science writer Oliver Morton observes in his essay on theBlackout series, the strange lack of depth brought by the reversal of negative intopositive, conjures up shadow-less radar imagery.(31) Holdsworth’s transmutedgeology, the illuminated striations on the glacier ’s sheer cliffs, like the filaments ofa spectral veil, is not unlike that of Venus, which, hidden beyond a denseatmosphere of opaque clouds of sulphuric acid, was revealed by the Magellanspacecraft in the 1990s. Its probing radar exposed landslides, craters and lavalakes, ridges and depressions, coronae and tectonic fractures of confoundingbeauty and complexity. The volcanic terrains of Venus are still throwing out

(30) Smith, Moondust, as above, p. 323.

(31) Oliver Morton, ‘After Utopia’, in Dan Holdsworth,Blackout, 2012, unpaginated.

PIA00095: Three-dimensional perspective views of VenusianTerrains composed of reduced resolution left-lookingsynthetic-aperture radar images merged with altimetry datafrom the Magellan spacecraft (1998).

surprises: active lava flows were discovered there in 2010.(32)

The aesthetic of Blackout also anticipates the eerie views of Comet 67PChuryumov-Gerasimenko beamed back by the ESA’s Rosetta/Philae mission inNovember 2014: a tumbling mountain of knife blade ridges and pallid screeslopes exposed by the glare of the distant sun. When NASA’s New Horizons probearrives at Pluto on 14 July 2015, we predict that the images returned from thisremote world will display yet more similarities to Holdsworth’s uncannyEarthscapes.

The forbidding Blackout series injects a sense of otherness into our own world. Indoing so, as Morton suggests, Holdsworth makes us look at these terrains likeexplorers of a distant planet.(33) In contrast, Philippe Pleasants yokes the sky tothe Earth, embedding it in the familiar and finite bounds of the English landscape(see pp 32 – 41). The ability of photography to record time as well as space is aprominent component in Pleasants’ work. His poetic land-, sea- and skyscapes(2010 - 11) deliberately condense the passage of time as marked out by themotion of the Moon, Sun and stars. This approach addresses the aesthetics ofmotion while making time visually tangible: for hundreds of years it was themovement of objects in the sky that was the most accurate and widely availableclock and measure of time. By using long exposures to capture the light fromcelestial bodies and their apparent motion in relation to the Earth, Pleasants layersdifferent concepts of space – a specific location and an astronomical abstract –and time – cosmological time, the geological timescale of the landscape, thehistory of its alteration by humankind, and the duration of the photographicexposure itself. Pleasants cites British physicist Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History ofTime (1998), with its famously mind-bending discussion of the ambiguous natureof time, space and light, as one starting point for these works. His recourse toanalogue photography further anchors his process in time, through theanticipation of the revelation of the image in the darkroom.

(32) Joshua Sokol, ‘Lava lakes spotted on Venus may be howit stays so blemish free’, New Scientist, 19 June 2015,http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27756-lava-lakes-spotted-on-venus-may-be-how-it-stays-so-blemishfree.html.

(33) Morton, ‘After Utopia’, as above.

A sense of place, and the investigation of our relationship to particular landscapes,is a powerful thread running through much of Pleasants’ work, and one whichparallels the renewed interest in landscape in contemporary British nature writingand poetry. In common with many of these writers Pleasants explicitly presents thesky and the astronomical objects it contains as intrinsic components of thelandscape itself, both as the source of the lighting conditions which imbue it with aconstantly changing character, and as embodiments of the passage of time.

In Pleasants’ solar and lunar durations the temporal element is spatially anchoredin the very specific English landscapes of Orford Ness in Suffolk. Solar Duration 3and 5, Suffolk (2011) can be seen as a contemplation on the nature of light: theluminescent band of the rising Sun is reflected as a golden glow on the calmexpanse of the North Sea, highlighting the pivotal importance of our local star asthe sustainer of life, civilisation and progress, but with undertones of its potentiallydestructive power.

At first glance Orford Ness, Suffolk (2010) provides a nocturnal counterpart to thesolar scenes but, however romantic this pair might appear to be, they also containa significant political dimension. The lunar diptych engages more explicitly withthe recent history of Orford Ness, a contested and liminal landscape that evokesthe contemporary aesthetic of the “edgelands”, where wilderness andurban/industrial influences collide and accommodate each other in unexpectedand unintended ways. Now a National Trust reserve, this was the site of militarytests carried out by the UK’s Ministry of Defence during the two World Wars andthroughout the Cold War. The isolated peninsula is particularly associated withattempts to extend the limits of human perception: various trials of early radartechnology were carried out here and it was also the site of the Blind LandingExperimental Unit, which “undertook pioneering work into fog structures, andvisibility in relation to flight”, as explored in the work of Jane and Louise Wilson, forinstance.(34) Likewise, Pleasants explores the relationship between the landscapeand the traces of its unusual military history, discretely revealed by the distinctivepagoda-shaped brutalist architecture of the Atomic Weapons Research

(34) Artists of the Untrue Island Project, Orford Ness,http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/article-1356392567173/.

Establishment silhouetted against the horizon. Long exposures capture thislandscape ‘in time’ and communicate its desolation and apocalyptic mood. Thecool, ominous darkness of the diptych, in which the light from the Moon could bethe trail of a rocket launch tearing the night sky apart, or the flash from anexplosion breaking the horizon, thus conjures visions of technological threat andhumanity’s destructive effects on nature - but also nature’s inexorable triumphover our own transient efforts.

The reflective lunar and solar sceneries reach a more abstract conclusion in thephotographer’s stellar diptych, in which time and space are again collapsed into apair of still images. Once more, this introduces a contemplative slowness into ourlooking, but here the effect is to distance us from the Earth. In Trace 3 and 4,London (2011), the sky’s motions are reduced to their geometric core, stripped ofall earthly references to become an abstract grid of curving lines – Pleasantsacknowledges the influence of minimalist and abstract painters Barnett Newmanand Clifford Still in these works. During the long exposure time of thephotographs the stars appear to trace circular arcs across the sky, although these“star trails” are in fact revealing the rotation of the Earth on its axis while thecelestial bodies themselves remain immobile. Intersecting the stellar tracks are theparallel lines drawn by the wing-tip lights of passing aircraft and the occasionaldiagonal track of an artificial satellite. Their rigid straightness contrasts with thecircular movements of the stars and evokes the pre-Copernican cosmology ofAristotle and Ptolemy, in which the prefect form of the circle characterised theheavens while brutal linearity and jarring angles were properties of the imperfecthuman world below. The monochromatic treatment of the images, and thereversal of positive into negative, allow a precise reading of the delicate lighttracings on a bleached cosmos.

The observation and exploration of space is sometimes caricatured as a hubristicattempt to domesticate infinity. While this element has undoubtedly been present,it has always run in parallel with a counterbalancing sense of humility. As Apolloveteran William Anders famously proclaimed, “we came all this way to explore the

moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the earth”. Thisemotion was shared by his fellow astronauts, as revealed in footage from theperiod. As Apollo 8 was making a live TV broadcast from lunar orbit on ChristmasEve, 1968, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell reflected on the sight of the tiny blueplanet in a boundless vacuum: “the vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makesyou realize just what you have back there on Earth.” Apollo 15 astronaut-turned-poet, Al Worden, likewise expressed an emotive sense of wonder when hereminisced:

Quietly, like a night bird, floating, soaring, wingless.We glide from shore to shore, curving and fallingbut not quite touching.Earth: a distant memory seen in an instant of repose,crescent shaped, ethereal, beautiful,I wonder which part is home, but I know it doesn't matter . . .the bond is there in my mind and memory;Earth: a small, bubbly balloon hanging delicatelyin the nothingness of space.(35)

As we have thus far failed to find evidence of life elsewhere, or even of anotherinhabitable world, the Earth seems all the more precious. This recognition of howrare and fragile, alive and beautiful our home planet is, has had a long termimpact ever since the Gemini and Apollo missions were launched, with theastronauts becoming unlikely heralds for the environmental movement. Anders’iconic Earthrise came to embody the first Earth Day in 1970.

And yet… The images produced as part of the NASA space programme also showhumanity’s presence etched onto distant worlds, from the Moonwalkers’ footstepsto the tracks and drilling holes left by rovers on the Moon and Mars and the litterof abandoned flags, modules and probes on satellites, planets and asteroids.Whether one considers these relics to be evidence of hubris, cosmic trash orfuture archaeology of the Space Age, they are joined by more personal – and

(35) Alfred M. Worden, Hello Earth: Greetings fromEndeavour, 1974.

poignant – traces of humankind, such as Paul van Hoeydonck’s Fallen Astronaut,secretly commissioned and placed on the Moon by David Scott in 1971, as amemorial to the fourteen astronauts and cosmonauts sacrificed to the SpaceRace, or Charles Duke’s happier picture of his family, resting on the lunar regolithfor eternity, their features gradually erased by the relentless radiation of theSun.(36) In a similar fashion, what is striking in the objects shown in this exhibitionis how the artists have stripped human presence away from Earthly landscapes togrant them alien resonance. The 1961 view of an unmanned Mercury-Atlas 4capsule after splashdown off Bermuda (see 70 - 71) ostensibly depicts ahomecoming, a return to the familiar environs of Earth, but the underwater imageis disorienting and confusing. After any journey, we can never see our place oforigin in quite the same way again.

By juxtaposing early space photographs - whose value at the time was as muchabout public relations as it was about science - with creative responses fromtoday’s more cynical world, dark frame / deep field explores a maturingengagement with the sublime spectacle beyond our planet’s atmosphere. At thetime considered to be harbingers of the future, vintage NASA photographs nowhave the graininess and faded colours of holiday snaps of the same period, givingthem an aura of nostalgia and optimism. But our frontiers never cease to expand.On 14 July 2015, NASA’s New Horizons probe will rendezvous with Pluto after anine year voyage, bringing another world into sharp focus for the first time. In theseventeenth century it was the beauty of Galileo’s drawings that brought homethe full revolutionary import of his discoveries. In the twenty-first century, astechnological advances give us access to ever more dizzying and humblingastronomical vistas, art is once more playing a vital role in conveying the meaningand implications of cosmic exploration.

(36) Corey S. Powell and Gwen Shapiro, ‘The Sculpture of theMoon’, published in Slate.com, 16 December 2013http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/12/sculpture_on_the_moon_paul_van_hoeydonck_s_fallen_astronaut.html.

We shall not cease from exploration,And the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot (Little Gidding V, Four Quartets, 1943)

BREESE LITTLE30b Great Sutton Street

London, EC1V 0DU

DirectorsJosephine Breese

Henry Little

dark frame / deep field CuratorsMarek Kukula

Melanie Vandenbrouck

Installation PhotographyTom Horak

Contactjosephine@breeselittle.com

07919 416290

henry@breeselittle.com07984 950951

Websitewww.breeselittle.com