Author Description

The story of Alexandra Mir's Space Tapestry: Faraway Missions, with reproductions of the finished work and images from its collaborative creation with twenty-five young artists. This book provides a companion to Aleksandra Mir's latest body of work Space Tapestry: Faraway Missions, exhibited at Tate Liverpool and Modern Art Oxford. Inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry and the anonymous artists who depicted Halley's Comet in 1066, the Space Tapestry is a large-scale, hand-drawn monochrome wall-hanging that forms an immersive environment. Much like a graphic novel, Space Tapestry tells an episodic visual story of space travel. Over the past three years, Mir has maintained dialogues with professionals in the space industry and academia who have informed and inspired her. The work draws on themes relating to current debates, recorded events, scientific discoveries, technological innovations and predictions of imagined futures that currently affect all our lives. This book contains both reproductions of the finished work and images from its collaborative creation with twenty-five young artists. It also contains sixteen in-depth new interviews with a wide range of professionals working in the space industries today, providing an intimate and informative insight into the present and future of space exploration. Interviewees Jan Woerner, Director General of the European Space Agency, Paris • Marek Kukula, Public Astronomer, Royal Observatory Greenwich, London • Clara Sousa-Silva, Quantum Astrochemist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA • Chris Welch, Director of the interdisciplinary MSc in Space Studies, International Space University in Strasbourg • Sanjeev Gupta, Strategic Planner, NASA Mars Rover Mission • Alice Gorman, Space Archeologist, Flinders University, Adelaide