ARTWORK DETAILS
Phenomena (The Philosophers Universal Optic) is a commission for friends fascinated by space and the universe.
The inspiration for the commission is a photograph of earth called the pale blue dot, one of Nasa’s family portraits taken by the Voyager spacecraft before switching off it’s instruments and continuing into interstellar space, and Carl Sagan’s reflections on the depiction of earth as a tiny dot and the only know source of life in the universe.
It’s a wonderful brief and not to be rushed. The research continues…
“Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”