YOUR BODY IS A SPACE THAT SEES

Your Body Is a Space That Sees is a series of cyanotype prints that sources historical imagery and narratives to trace contributions of women in astronomy since antiquity. The series of large-scale cyanotype prints interpret a fragmented history and represent a female-centric astronomical catalog of craters, comets, galaxies, and nebula drawing from narrative, imagery, and historical accounts of Hypatia of Alexandria, Caroline Herschel, Helen Sawyer Hogg, and a group of women at Harvard in the late 1800s known as Pickering’s Harem or the Harvard Computers.

Cyanotypes are printed from painted negatives that are based on the objects and narratives that were connected to these early astronomers. This process mimics early astronomical glass plates moving between transparent surfaces to a photograph without the use of a camera.

Lia Halloran’s research for this series was done in partnership with the Harvard University Archive, which houses the world’s largest collection of historic astronomical photographic plates. Halloran identified specific plates used by these women and utilized them as a reference for her large paintings; she then pays tribute to these women by including their names and their discoveries in the titles of the works.

This work has been included in various solo exhibitions seen at Luis De Jesus, LUX Art Institute, Schneider Museum of Art, and the University of Maryland Art Gallery. It has also been shown in multiple group shows including “Observable Universe: Visualizing the Cosmos in Art” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and “Stargazers: Intersections of Contemporary Art and Astronomy” at Orange Coast College’s Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion.

This project has been generously supported by an Art Works Grant from the National Endowment of the Arts in partnership with Chapman University.

For more info about the NEA: https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2015/12/11/professor-halloran-awarded-nea-art-works-grant/