At 12.40 am BST on 30 July, the unmanned cargo resupply spacecraft Georges Lemaître ATV 5 will launch from the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana, on a mission to supply the International Space Station (ISS) with propellant, water, air and dry cargo. Included in this dry cargo will be a hand-sized, re-formed meteorite created by Berlin-based artist Katie Paterson. When it arrives at its destination on 12 August 2014, the meteorite will become the first artwork aboard the ISS.
The re-formed Campo del Cielo meteorite is part of a series, currently on display in Paterson’s exhibition Ideas at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh. The works were created by taking pieces of meteorite that formed in space four and a half billion years ago and transforming their atoms by melting and recasting each into an altered version of itself. Whilst six of these meteorites are being exhibited at Ingleby Gallery as part of the artist’s Generation show, the seventh, and smallest, is now set to travel back to space, via the European Space Agency’s craft.
Previous projects by the Scottish artist have also explored ideas of translation, distance, and scale with particular reference to cosmology and physics. For her work Second Moon, which was commissioned by Locus+ in 2013, she sent a small fragment of the moon on a year long, man-made commercial orbit around the Earth via an airfreight courier, while her limited edition project All the Dead Stars (2012) is a map documenting the locations of just under 27,000 dead stars – all that have been recorded and observed by humankind.
Katie Paterson – Meteorite Space Launch takes place 12.40 am BST, 30 July 2014. Watch the launch live at www.arianespace.tv
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