‘Crater, Dickinson’, Magellan Data Records.
‘Dickinson Crater II’, 3D Print.
‘Venus, 03.45, 20.10.12, 52°20'41.09"N 1°34'38.63"W’, Slide Projection.
‘Venus, Displaced 270° East Longitude’ & ‘Venus, Displaced 90° East Longitude’, Four colour photo-etchings.
‘Dickinson Crater III’, Moving Image.
2013
This body of work stems from research into NASAs Magellan spacecraft and its mission to map and image the hostile environment of Venus in the early 1990s. Intrinsic to Magellan’s radar visions are technological distortions offering a different kind of perception to that of the photographic. It is in this sense that these images are unintelligible, and therefore ask the viewer to fill in the blanks.
Through the use of appropriation in the form of paper collage, to creating and inhabiting a virtual landscape through 3D printing and animation, I built up an inquiry into one particular place. My vision of this landscape ‘Dickinson Crater’ was fabricated through scientific research and the few radar images that exist, the outcomes of which manifested themselves in different forms. I see the translation between the virtual and the tangible within my practice as having a strong relationship to the language of printmaking; whilst each work shares the same content and conceptual methodology, each also shares a material relationship to print.
Interested in the idea of only ever knowing something through representation, this work attempted to make the unknowable palpable, to try to comprehend something on the very edge of our imagination. It is for this reason that I see the work as oscillating between the realm of the scientific ‘virtual rendition’ and that of science fiction.