First Contact Artistic research and responses to Harvard Plate Stacks, 2024–
Supported by Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice Grant 2025–26
First Contact is comprises artistic research that responds to the Harvard Plate Stacks. Exploring the materiality of glass plates and the work of the women ‘computers’ whose intimate work helped shape our knowledge of the cosmos. Multiple artworks consider the importance of the Harvard Spectra plates and the historical and contemporary applications of spectroscopy.
In his recent book on the James Webb Space Telescope, Richard Panek describes the ability of spectroscopy – the chemical 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. This has driven my thinking around the photographic as our first contact with outer space and how the women computers were often the first to have physical contact with the data. Through my expanded photographic practice I respond to this encounter – against the context of the rapid increase of human activity in outer space – to reimagine it with attention and care.
Planned works currently in development are a monumental silver-work embroidery, silver knot-work, glass, calcite (Iceland spar) prisms, water (the first prism), silver crystals and replica photographic glass-plate assemblages. Together they articulate complex loops and entanglements between the human, the technological and the mineral, and how perception and knowledge are mediated through the depths of the earth out into the cosmic.
This research project has also led to the development of Exophotography, a series of glass plate chemigrams and a text that imagines what photography might be when unmoored from Earth and its human author (more here).
The works are currently be developed for exhibition in 2028.