We Are All Stardust
“We Are All Stardust,” is my current installation that has been touring Canada during this year’s festival season. My first ever fully printed custom art dome, the purpose of this project is to recreate a sense of childlike wonder and world-building.
Participants are asked to enter the dome and pick a fabric star that speaks to them. They label it and pin it somewhere in the dome. In the dome are notebooks where they can make up information about the star that they have labeled.
They are asked to name a planet in their newly identified solar system, identify the type of lifeforms, languages, rituals, etc. There is space in the notebooks to draw and dream. Each new participant not only names and creates their own idea of a solar system, but is able to find the stars and read about the planets and worlds that other people have already created.
The intent of this project is to get people to think about the universe outside of our individual worlds. Instead of a project being introspective and self focused, it is getting people out of the “reality” of their lives to dream that anything is possible.
The response by individuals who have seen this on the circuit this year has been truly magical. Having a custom printed dome creates a space that completely envelops the viewer. Instead of the dome being the infrastructure that holds the art, the dome itself becomes the full art piece. The effect is enveloping and adds to the viewers capacity to sink in and experience the art.
Although I’ve wanted to do this for so long, and I find the final effect of the custom printed dome stunning, the process of creating this work was quite a bit more than I originally bargained for.
To start with, domes are compounding spaces, meaning that each time you make a dome bigger you exponentially increase the size of your panels. The sheer amount of material it takes to cover a dome is so much more than it would take to cover another structure.
When you count up the the number of individual “windows” in the dome that need to be covered in fabric, you’re talking about 18-20 openings. While that is a large amount of material, the interesting part becomes that each one of those spaces has to be treated as its own separate art panel. Rather than thinking about the interior of the dome being one full printed piece, you have to look at the orientation and connectedness of each panel individually. Each separate panel has to be photoshopped, orientated and sent to the printers and tested. This expounds the print, R&D and setup costs.
The file sizes of these pieces are also huge. Because you have to create an image that’s the size of the panel in order to have high print quality, it takes the tech or artist a large amount of time just to be processing the files. It took forever for my old little laptop to handle these pieces, making the time this work took so much more than I bargained for.
While the beauty of a fully printed dome is sometimes worth the price, the cost of all of these things put together was almost prohibitively expensive. While I loved the look of having a custom printed art dome, It will probably be a while before I take on a print job at this scale again.
One thing that was really amazing about it though, is that, contrary to so many sculptures, once this piece was printed it was an absolute breeze of an art piece to install! Because the dome itself was the art, I didn’t have to worry about little parts of pieces, or building something extra on site. It was great!
The feedback from participants was great too. It was such a simple project, but people really expressed good experiences inside of the dome. A couple people expressed to me that it was one of their favourite festival activities, and that the world building activity real helped them think most consciously about the world around them.
Even when art making is sometimes really difficult, it’s all worth it when it’s meaningful to the participants.
