LIA HALLORAN
The 18th century French astronomer Charles Messier set his telescopic sights on the grand prize of finding a lonely, wandering comet. He ended up amassing an astronomical inventory filled with galaxies, clusters and nebulae. A catalogue of 110 objects is credited to his journals and drawings.
Deep Sky Companion is a series of 110 pairs of paintings and photographs of night sky objects drawn from the Messier catalogue.
These works are about discovery and all the things we find when we are not seeking them. It relates to my own challenging first stabs at observing the night sky. In college I was given a small Celestron telescope for Christmas. observing the Orion Nebula and nearby galaxies seemed to create a fold in time between Messier and myself.
I would imagine his sessions observing through his telescope and the drawings he made to classify the natural world and make sense of the unknown above him.
Each painting in the Deep Sky Companion series was created in ink on semi-transparent paper, which was then used as a negative to create the positive photographic equivalent using standard black-and-white darkroom printing. This process connects to the historical drawings by Messier, here redrawn and then turned back into positives through a photographic process mimicking early glass-plate astrophotography.