Felicity Spear

As curator and participating artist I have drawn together a group of eight diverse artists who ideas focus on cosmic space and sky-situated knowledge. Today we see our horizon expanding exponentially. Increasingly technological sophistication is enabling us to survey and appreciate the structure of the Universe. Cosmic space is no longer understood as a clockwork mechanism and a quantity of discrete objects. Now it is thought of as a set of interacting processes and relational fields which also present different scales and durations from our own. Together the artists create speculative works referencing various systems of knowledge, as well as relationships between the natural and constructed worlds and those of the human and non-human worlds. Worlds in which paradoxically, we see ourselves attached and detached from other living things through a machine produced visibility.

Employing painting, photography, digital media and sculpture these works explore the history and properties of the lens and telescope, the shared ground between abstraction, mathematics and science, the virtual world of technology which gives access to an unseen sky, mapping space, alternative or fictional worlds, solargraphy, and the reciprocity between earth and sky. In this way these artists are interested in raising awareness of the connections to be found between scientific and technological knowledge and innovation, and how these might be disseminated through other disciplines or fields of endeavour such as the arts and humanities.