I learned about Los Angeles, California-based artist Lia Halloran via Dr. Rebecca Oppenheimer, and luckily she reminded me about these enormous, astronomy (& astronomer!) inspired cyanotype prints (try it yourself!) recently so now I am sharing them with you!
From the project’s website:
Your Body is a Space That Sees is series of cyanotype prints that sources historical imagery and narratives to trace contributions of women in astronomy since antiquity. The of series of large scale cyanotype prints will interpret a fragmented history and represent a female-centric astronomical catalog of craters, comets, galaxies and nebula drawing from narrative, imagery and historical accounts of Hypatia of Alexandria, Caroline Herschel, Helen Sawyer Hogg, and a group of women at Harvard in the late 1800’s known as Pickering’s Harem or the Harvard Computers.
Cyanotypes are printed from painted negatives that are based on the objects and narratives that were connected to these early astronomers. This process mimics early astronomical glass plates moving between transparent surfaces to a photograph without the use of a camera.
Discerning startorialists might recognize the Orion Nebula, the Horsehead Nebula, or even the pulsar graph from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy. The last image is based on this photograph of the “Harvard Computers” from 1918. (Some of these women are featured in the Star Women design by @pacalin.) Did you know you can help transcribe their work? Check out Project PHAEDRA.
--Emily
