JUPITER'S SKY

Text of the video:

"Mom, stop the music!"

"What is it?"

"How many moons does Jupiter have?"

"Maybe 100."

"How does that even work? What if they crash into each other?"

"Sometimes they do..."

Here we are, riding in the car on a Tuesday, breathless with the sudden awareness of danger in Jupiter's sky. And this is how ideas for artwork arrive, as sudden urgent questions: How does that work?

Jupiter has at least 95 moons and thousands of smaller objects in orbit. The 8 largest moons follow predictable, circular paths. But the rest are not so orderly. Jupiter captures passing asteroids and makes them irregular satellites.

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When they crash into each other, the debris organizes itself into collisional families. Everything is orbiting in different directions and angles.

Now consider the Earth, Moon, and Sun. So orderly. So comfortable. Day, night, seasons, and tides arrive on a predictable schedule. Spheres with regular, circular orbits. Nice and clean.

But life is not like that. Life is more like Jupiter: a swirling gas ball surrounded by risk in many sizes, shapes, and trajectories. They wake us up with "stop the music!" moments of awareness of the danger in our own skies.

In these mixed media pieces, I build new stories about Jupiter's moons, to keep them safe. I organized them into lines and grids. I stacked them. I invited them to play nicely together. I soaked them in ink. I peeled them apart and put them back together. I covered the moons in bubble wrap and tucked them away in sandwich bags. The terrifying idea that I am responding to is that objects that exist outside of geologic time can also be ephemeral.

I imagined how that might look, how that might work. Imagined is the key. I tried not to look at NASA images because I did not want competing visual information in my head. I left room in the work for interesting ideas, wrong assumptions, and magical thinking.

The Jupiter's Sky pieces are part of my main body of work about resilience and space science. Playful experimentation is at the heart of my process. I used play as an intentional tool for investigation. I create games for myself and try to discover multiple solutions within established boundaries. Experimental play offers a safe method for engaging with risk and confronting fears. I devised many possible solutions to the problem of vulnerability in Jupiter's sky.