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SKIES


This section features a series of short essays addressing a diverse range of culturally and historically specific skies.

The essays fall into two categories: some ask fundamental questions about the sky within contemporary culture and others explore specific images or accounts of the sky. However the two categories intertwine: questions are answered with reference to particular images and images are explored by drawing out fundamental questions.

Historical periods are also mashed-up: Yuri Gagarin’s breaching of the heavens is compared to accounts of
Flammarion's medieval missionary; Correggio's painting in Parma Cathedral is linked with Gemini IV's space documentation, and contemporary artist Joelle Tuërlinckx's sculptural blue holes are placed back into Paolo Veronese’s Christ Addressing a Kneeling Woman as if missing pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

Read in conjunction these essays begin to sketch an image of our sky today, pin-pointing specific ways in which the sky is different from and similar to skies that have come before. All the essays are extracts from a larger research project. 








Images (top to bottom): detail of a photograph taken from the International Space Station (Image Credit: NASA); detail from a woodcut of Flammarion's Missionary