The Lunar Mission Gallery
The earth's moon is like no other
Epidermis
Despite the increasingly commonplace discovery of exoplanets and their orbiting satellites, the earth's moon is unmatched; its size, mass, composition, and relationship with its home world is unique.
The cosmic knocks, scrapes, and crashes that have pummeled the lunar surface over four and a half billion years since its birth - as much as the influence of its constant companion earth, has led to a place that from afar looks nothing more than a grey sphere of desolate dust.
"Epidermis" presents the surface of our moon as a tactile skin of shallow bumps, ridges, and subtle shades of colour, as if the pelt of some ancient being. Faint, straight-veined lines of latitude and longitude beat beneath the membrane of painterly marks.
The artwork encourages us to consider the moon as a dynamic, changing entity. One that we observe in increasing detail with the probes we send to scan its captivating surface, and one we can almost feel as we reach toward its tantalizing crust.
I often wonder why I am drawn to the moon. Epidermis sets my thoughts in motion about our need to touch a thing. Perhaps this harks back to our infancy, when touch was our first tool to explore the universe. Touch remains our primal sense, despite our reliance on our more detached senses of sight and sound...
