LUNA analogue facility (Moon hall) 7.1316
Original painting, included in my solo exhibition Slow Creep at Project 78 Gallery.
acrylic ink and gouache on board, lunar dust (regolith analogue)
556 x 400mm
2024
In the spring of 2024, I plotted a line of latitude (50.8518) through Project 78 Gallery on the south coast of England and followed it eastward online, creating a route
for a hypothetical circumnavigation—a virtual journey that would yield the imagery from which to make an exhibition. The impossible tour crossed 19 countries and two oceans—traversing cities, agricultural land, wilderness, mountains and lakes while locating multiple sites of cultural production, extractivism, protest, conflict, dispossession, extraterrestrial exploration, leisure and recreation.
Read more at https://jamieatherton.com/slow-creep/
Painting derived from images of the LUNA analogue facility near Cologne, Germany, part of the Deutsches Zentrum für Luftusedund Raumfahrt campus (also known as the German Aerospace Center) where a simulated moonscape is under construction. In summer 2024, 900 tonnes of fake moon dust were deposited across the floor of the 700 square metre Moon Hall. The novel large-volume lunar regolith simulant, called EAC-1, consists of volcanic powder from eruptions in the nearby Eifel volcanic region that occurred around 45 million years ago. A joint project with the European Space Agency, the facility will be used for, among other things, lunar surface training for astronauts and robots.
