Cathy's Art Diary

Beautiful installation in the Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College by Luke Jerram. The work consists of a 7m wide model of Mars based on NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter data. Jerram had previously done similar installations of the Earth and the Moon in the same space and has since done one of the Sun. The planet floats ethereally in the space and has a similar colour palette to the busy painting around it. I think the Earth was my favourite as it is a more familiar image with more features. A commentary board highlights images of the god Mars and of Galileo on the ceiling.   Closed 20 January 2025

Fascinating online interview with photographer Michael Najjar to mark Photo London. Najjar has become fascinated by space exploration since watching a live rocket launch in 2011. Since then he has built up a body of 65 photographs and 5 video installations in his Outer Space series. He sees space as a unique cultural and scientific world. He discussed how he had undergone space training in Russia with cosmonauts and had experimented with taking photographs in a weightless environment. He constructs realities to show the possibilities of space. He then took us through a selection of his works explaining how they were achieved and what they represent. There was a sense of the sublime about a number of these and in fact the picture shown here was inspired by Caspar David Friedrick’s “The Ice Field”. It shows the wreck of the Virgin Atlantic Galactica in 2014 made up of a digitally manipulated press footage. Sadly didn’t manage to get to Photo London to see the works in the person ...

Fascinating outdoor exhibition in the courtyard of Burlington House organised by the Geological Society of London of photographs of the solar system. The show, part of the society’s 2021 Year of Space, combined stunning photographs with interesting descriptions of the geological phenomena they show comparing them to the geology of the earth over a series of free standing displays. An interesting and well displayed public show. Closes 8 October 2021  

Fascinating exhibition at the National Maritime Museum looking at the science and cultural significance of the Moon. I loved the mix of science and society in this show. It opened with a look at what the moon has meant to people over the years and how its cycle has influenced us even before we understood it. It then looked at the early science of discovery including a mention of James Nasmyth who had also been featured in the Enlightenment exhibition I’d been to earlier that week. I loved the section on the art of the moon including this lovely picture of it seen from the Thames at Greenwich, a view I have seen many times. It included the earliest drawings as well as contemporary art. There was also a good section explaining the science and for all of ten minutes I understood tides but I’m afraid I’m back to being puzzled. There was of course an excellent section on the Apollo space missions as the show was marking the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. This include...

Interesting temporary display at the Science Museum looking at Britain’s unmanned rocket, Skylark. I hadn’t know anything about this and was fascinated by this display. The rocket was designed for scientific experiments and began flying in 1957. It operated out of the Millard Space Science Laboratory and its work included taking ultraviolet images of the cosmos. I was surprised at how small it was and that each one only flew for 10 minutes and yet there were nearly 450 flights in all. I loved a video of people who worked on the project sharing their memories of it. My father worked at a scientific establishment in the 1950s and they reminded me of him and his friends and the stories they told. It also pointed out that, as it only stopped flying in 2005, many of the current astro-scientists started their careers using it as part of their phds. Closing date unknown. 

Interesting display at the Science Museum looking at the life of Valentine Tereshkova, the first woman to go into space. Tereshkova spent three days in space in 1963 when she was 26 and is still the only woman to have done a solo space flight. The show looked not just at the flight but also her life after as an international representative of the USSR. There were some lovely personal objects like her parachute suit and a seagull broach she wore as her call sign had been seagull. The display was only a small room but the space was used well with a good video being played on a big screen over one of the display cases and a wonderful large portrait of Tereshkova by Amir Mazitov hung low down and taking up a whole wall. It felt like she’d entered our space and was sitting with us. Closes on 17 September 2017.

Fascinating lecture at the Science Museum by the curator of the Cosmonauts exhibition, Natalia Sidlina. It turned out she is an art historian not a scientist and had approached the show with an eye to the art of the objects and the art it has inspired. I hadn’t really understood the last room of the show which just had one a wooden mannequin in it on a platform in a red and blue room but she talked us thought the significance of it. The red represents Mars and the blue the sky. The mannequin was designed to take around the moon before man went to test space’s influence on organic matter which was placed in small cavities in the body. It hadn’t needed to be in the shape of a man or to have the face of Yuri Gagarin but it showed how the philosophy and science of space were entwined together. She went into a lot of detail on the early philosophy of space in Russia. I’m not sure I understood all of it but I could see how it came from the same sources as the influences on m...

Fantastic exhibition at the Science Museum looking at the story of Russia’s relationship with space. The show was visually stunning with lots of fantastic objects and stories. It was brilliantly laid out with good vistas through the displays and there was always something ahead to catch the eye! I was fascinated that it not only looked at the science but also at the philosophy of space in Russia. The 1917 revolution encouraged people to think of new worlds on earth and the Cosmos. Soon after the revolution clubs grew up which encouraged people to exchange ideas of space and there looked at the imaginative possibilities. A philosopher called Tsiokovsky imaged the science and he was followed by Korolev, who developed the science off the back of missile research. It told the stories of the people so well with a great section on the early Cosmonauts with a particular look at Yuri Gagarin and how he was chosen for his character as well as his abilities as they realised the...

Very calming exhibition at the National Maritime Museum looking in at how telescopes and photography have changed how we view the universe. The earliest photo dated from 1840 but the works came right up to date with very recent images from satellites. The exhibition was arranged by subject so there were sections on the moon, the sun, earth etc. As well as showing stunning images the commentary told you about the things being photographed and I felt I came out knowing a lot more than when I went in. The images had an interesting effect on the viewers with everyone having a slightly far away peaceful look. It certainly made you think of the vastness of the universe and how small we in it. It seems to slot things into place.