First Contact Artistic research and responses to Harvard Plate Stacks, 2024– Image details from work-in-progress and artefacts including glass spectra plates from Harvard Plate Stacks and and prisms from linked collections.
Supported by Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice Grant 2025–26. New works in development for 2028.
Multiple artworks explore the materiality of glass plates and the work of the women ‘computers’ whose intimate labour helped shape our knowledge of the cosmos, with a particular focus on the spectra plates and the historical and contemporary significance of spectroscopy.
In his recent book on the James Webb Space Telescope, Richard Panek describes the ability of spectroscopy – the atomic fingerprint of matter in light – to ‘collapse the distance between a faraway place and your hands’. It has the ability to tell us about the composition of distant worlds and stars – essentially what the cosmos is made of. This has driven my thinking around the photographic (via astronomical imaging technologies) as our first contact with outer space and how this can be imagined with attention and care, especially given the rapid expansion of human activity in outer space.
Several new works in development include: a large-scale silver-work embroidery; silver crystal blooms; assemblages incorporating replica photographic glass plates, calcite prisms (Iceland spar), water (the first prism), silver knotwork and small-scale embroideries. Together the works look at the relationship between light and darkness as well as the complex entanglements between the human, the mineral and the technological.
This research builds on my earlier DYCP award, Through Machine & Darkness (2019–), which explores the growing use of machine learning and AI in examining astronomical datasets, and what this changing landscape means for attention and our ways of knowing the cosmos.