Staring into Space
Celebrating this weekend’s ’Great Planet Parade’ has been a reminder of my fascination with space from an early age and the importance of personal exploration, for both your career and creative soul.
This weekend saw the ‘Great Planet Parade’ – the aligning of all seven planets in the night’s sky, many of which are visible to the naked eye. My five year old son Arlo, like my wife
and I, has already become an avid stargazer and it has been extremely heartwarming to see him excitedly run outside in his pyjamas before bed the past few nights to take a look at the sky and see what planets we can spot.I’m proud to have passed on the same fascination of space that was passed onto me by my Dad at an early age, who started his career as a Geology teacher. His fascination with rocks and minerals played a big part in our childhood and I fondly remember family trips down to the Jurassic Coast to hunt for fossils, often finding piles of ammonites in the rocks.
My Dad is also an avid star gazer, and he would often wake us up at some ungodly hour in the morning to watch the meteor showers in the sky over our house. At the time we lived in the Cheddar Valley, away from the city lights, with a great view out over the Somerset Levels, leading to some perfect stargazing conditions.
My wife and I have continued this fascination with the night sky, often taking joy in staying in areas where there’s less light pollution, so that we can see the stars more clearly. One such trip was a visit to Iceland, whilst Ciara was pregnant with Arlo. One night we were driving back to our accommodation and were lucky enough to be greeted by a stunning Northern Lights display, a truly magical moment.
This interest in space and the great beyond has inevitably bled into my artwork and over the years I’ve crafted an array of personal pieces exploring this subject.
The Importance of Personal Work
I often mention to students and during talks and lectures the importance of personal exploration on our creative practice. Not only is it a good chance to fill gaps in your portfolio, but it’s also really healthy for your creative soul, giving you a chance to explore ideas and create without a client watching over your shoulder. This can lead down some exciting new paths and in turn I have found that clients are often more drawn to this work as inspiration for commissions, as if they can sense the passion and excitement that has gone into the creations.
A good example of this is my pair of ‘Distant Aeons’ artworks that I created for my Paper Cut book launch exhibition back in 2014. I was so busy curating the show and organising the shipping of works from the twenty five featured artists around the world, that I realised I didn’t have any of my own work to show! So I hastily put together these two pieces – a mirror image of artworks, exploring themes of wormholes and parallel universes.
At the time this pair of artworks felt new and fresh, unlike any other work I had created or seen before. Looking back now I’m realising that these two artworks were really the start of my most well known style – exploring multiple concentric layers of paper, often using sweeping gradients of tone. This has led to a huge array of wonderful and varied projects over the years, as well as plenty of new personal pieces. This includes my The Sublime Spectrum series, which I deep dived in my last post here:
Deep Dive into The Sublime Spectrum
A few years ago I started a new personal series, playing with concentric hand-cut layers of paper and sweeping gradients of colour. This was a chance for me to delve into the mass of paper stock that I’d hoarded over my fifteen years as a full-time paper artist, spilling out of every shelf and draw…
Exploring New Materials and Techniques
Personal exploration can also be a great chance to try out new mediums and techniques, as I found with my personal series The Discoverer’s Alliance. At the time I’d been mainly focused on my top-down layered style of works and felt in need of a change of pace and approach.
As if by some divine intervention, I happened to be paired up with photographer Benedict Morgan on a project. During the shoot we were chatting about personal collaborations and he showed me some references he’d gathered of a rocket launch and how he wanted to try to recreate this as a set. It felt new and exciting and was just what I needed to flex some new creative muscles, so we started fleshing out this idea.
This was the initial seed of what would become a new mockumentary series, with Benedict and I building out a full world around this fictional “lesser known exploration society.” We pitched ourselves as two journalists with unprecedented access to The Discoverer’s Alliance’s offices and archives, for the first time revealing these images to the public. It was a really fun project and a great chance to experiment and bring in some weird and wonderful new materials, as well as to explore narrative.
“To mark their 100th Anniversary The Discoverer’s Alliance have opened their doors for the first time, allowing Owen Gildersleeve and Benedict Morgan unprecedented access to the organisation’s offices and archives. Through this special documentary project, the pair hope to give a unique insight into the inner workings of one of the country’s most accomplished but lesser known exploration societies.”
One of my favourite parts of the project was a research trip to the Natural History Museum, where I found myself immediately drawn to the rocks and minerals room, bringing back early memories with my family.
Whilst looking at these rocks we started dreaming up fun ways we could recreate them using household materials and foods, including noodles, Blu Tack, expanding foam and even Twiglets. This formed the basis of one of my favourite images from the series, completed with hessian table cloth and some silly name tags inspired by real crystals – ‘Noodleite’, ‘Bluetactium’, ‘Twigletonium’ and ‘Large Pastanium Structure’ being a few of my favourites.
We were delighted to arrange a show at Mother London to launch the series, as well as to be featured in It’s Nice That with a lovely write-up on the project. This has in turn led to some weird and wonderful projects in this more 3D space, including trips out to San Jose for two consecutive years to build paper models for SiliCon, as well as being tasked with building a life-size paper car for Nissan.
Visiting NASA
In a fantastically full circle moment, these projects have also led me getting to visit the real NASA! A few years back I was fortunate enough to pay a visit to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, to meet with The Studio – a team of designers, strategists and thinkers who devise visual works and installations for the Pasadena site, as well as for advertising and learning about their research and missions.
We were taken on a tour of the facilities, including Mission Control and the fantastically named ‘Spacecraft Assembly Facility’, where we were able to watch the Mars Rover Perseverance being built. The craft eventually landed in 2021 and it’s truly amazing to think that whilst I type this the rover is currently on the surface of Mars, exploring the red planet and sending its data back to the JPL team.
Following this trip I was delighted to get to collaborate with the JPL Studio team on two different installation projects, including an original artwork on Atmospheric Rivers which is currently on display in the Earth Science wing.
Observations from the Unknown
The trip has also had further influence on my personal practice, with some of the fascinating conversations I had with The Studio team sparking some new ideas.
One such discussion was about the NASA Kepler spacecraft, which was still active at the time – a space observatory launched in 2009, with the aim to survey a portion of the Milky Way galaxy in search of new exoplanets.
Until my meeting at JPL I’d never heard of an exoplanet, so I was amazed to find out that at the time of our meeting Kepler had already discovered over 2,000 of these planets. Also that a few of the Earth-sized exoplanets are orbiting the habitable zone of their stars, also known as the ‘Goldilocks Zone’ – where the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold, so leading to the possibility of life.
I was so mesmerised by these new findings, that following the trip I started delving into the research. The team had informed me that all of the data gathered by Kepler about these exoplanets is accessible through the NASA site and archive, but intriguingly other than this nobody actually knows what these planets look like.
This idea really fascinated me and made me wonder if there were ways to portray these new exoplanets using the data alone? So I started picking out some of Kepler’s key finding, such as ‘Kepler-16b’ – the first planet to be discovered orbiting a pair of binary stars. I then started designing a series of artworks using the data gathered about each planet, such as the mass, orbital periods, radius and age to create forms, rings and starbursts to spell out the name of each planet in a super abstract manner.
This series became titled Observations from the Unknown and I was lucky to get to present the body of work as a solo exhibition at ARGONAUT Gallery in San Francisco in 2018. Alongside the paper cut pieces I also used this show as a chance to further explore some new mediums and techniques, including an array of hand cut painted board displays and a large textile wall hanging, inspired by my Mum’s practice.
Just by chance the NASA Kepler spacecraft also ceased its mission during the course of the show, finally running out of fuel nine years after it first launched, having discovered over 2,600 exoplanets. It’s kind of romantic to think that the craft will now continue to maintain its current orbit around the Sun until the end of time.
The show ran for over a month and I thought it would be a fun chance to also use the gallery as a space for talks and workshops to introduce people to my craft. For one such event my US agents Levine/Leavitt invited an array of Creative Directors from various local companies, including Apple, Meta, Google and Sephora for a special guest workshop, to try out paper cutting for themselves. It was a really fun evening and wonderful to see this array of creatives, many of which had new touched a scalpel before, to each walk away with these fabulous paper cut creations.
This show and workshop has led to lots of further projects and commissions and has again made me realise the importance of personal exploration and trying out new things. Something I’m realising whilst I type this that I’m very much in the need of right now, so maybe it’s time to delve back into the great unknown to rustle up a brand new body of work? Watch this space!
I hope you enjoyed this article and you can find out more about all of these projects, alongside many more, in my portfolio. Thanks for following! Owen
Awesome work Owen. 🚀🚀🚀🚀
Total supernova ✨