I like art, not the “Frasier” kind of like art but I now and then see paintings in display when walking pass by galleries that I would like to have. So I’m always delighted to see some new kind of art. A while ago I wrote about Mario Bros. La Pietà sculpture. A great example of how modern topics are used in an art form.
Australian artist Peter Hennessey came with the great idea to create live sized wooden sculptures of several spacecrafts such as The Hubble telescope and the Lunar Rover.
We never really get to see spacecrafts, it’s not as they can get the Mars Rover back and put it in a museum for people to see in real life. We experience space and spacecrafts entirely through photo’s and sometimes video.
That’s why Peter Hennessey decided to build spacecrafts sculptures.
By ‘re-enacting’ space traveling, scientific and military objects in plywood, galvanized steel and canvas, the artist creates ‘stand-ins’ that allow the viewer to contemplate their physical, symbolic and historical resonances as well as the political processes that they represent.
To build the Hubble telescope sculpture Peter used for the technical planning, only images and Adobe Illustrator, it took three months to build the telescope from laser cutting the parts to assembling them.
As a spacecraft noob I can’t really phantom how large actually spacecrafts are, it’s really hard to process it if I don’t see a human standing next to it to get come perspective. Things like saying the new Boeing airplane’s wing are “half a football field”(not that I now how many football fields a Boeing wing is) or other measurement like that don’t really say anything to me.
Being able to see Peter’s sculptures live would help a lot of people to get some perspective of how big actually these crafts and telescopes are. And to think all the technology inside the real thing must be 100% perfect because once send to space there is seldom an opportunity to go to it and fix it.
On Peter’s website you can see more photo’s from several other sculptures he has made.
Note: The Hubble telescope photo is copyrighted by designboom.
