The layers on the unseen

            “The stars we see in our galaxy vary widely in age. Some are extremely old, some very young; most like our Sun, lie between those extremes. It follows that we ought to find evidence of stellar birth and death going on around is, just as in the human community we find that some persons are younger, some older, and that births and deaths are constantly taking place.”           

            The spaces between the stars of our galaxy are littered with clouds of dust gas. Stars form such clouds, which are characteristically very thin, but so vast that they have enough mass in the aggregate to make billions of suns. At any given time most of the atoms in an average interstellar drift along on their own. Some couple with other atoms to form molecules, and molecules in turn wanders the wastelands of space. For stars to form a cloud, such as the Eagle Nebula, enough of these wandering atoms must be brought together so that gravity, a very weak force, is able to leather them and arrest their independent meanderings. Once this has happened, the bundle of atoms that results is able to capture other atoms that it encounters, binding them to the group, slowly increasing the groups mass and with its gravitational attraction.            

             For this project, I decided to create computer-generated images that replicate the forms of nebulas, and interstellar clouds. Just as NASA use RGB, to create the colors of different nebulas, and clouds, I used a flat scanner with the properties of RGB, and distortion of hand made materials that create or resemble light from the stars. My interest into making these was my fascination in zoomed in telescope images of the deepest encounters that we have with space, and capturing the accumulations of different elements and lights that create the forms that are out there.