The annual Tulca Festival of Visual Arts opens this weekend in venues throughout Galway City, with Aisling O’Beirn’s project, Light Years from Here promising to be one of the more unusual exhibitions
Light Years from Here is about looking at stars, telling stories about stars and thinking about the connection between time and stars, explains Aisling, a Belfast artist who is fascinated by the mysteries of the universe.
Since earliest times, cultures across the world have used stars to tell the time, plan land-use and speculate about the future, she says. People have also used stars to navigate.
Because all the stars in the sky are at different distances from the earth, light takes different amounts of time to reach us. Depending on where we look at the night sky we can see starlight from different time periods, according to Aisling, who did a degree in fine art at the University of Ulster in Belfast, followed by a PhD and whose latest sculptural work is about exploring space as a physical structure and a political entity
“Depending on where we look, we can see light ranging from the start of the Muslim Hijri calendar (622) to the launch of Sputnik (1957),” she adds.
Aisling’s work is often collaborative and Light Years from Here involves Galway residents from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. They met her in September, when they gave her dates and stories that had political, historical or cultural significance for them. Aisling then created a series of star charts, helped by the Centre for Astronomy at NUI Galway. Researchers at the centre helped her to identify stars related to these people’s stories.
And so, Star HR 8832, from the constellation Cassiopeia relates to November 24, 1995 when the divorce referendum was passed in Ireland – this star which is 12.5 billion years old, is 21 light years away from earth.
Thirty-two years ago, 15-year-old Ann Lovett was found dead at a grotto in Longford with her newborn baby, having died during childbirth. The star that reflects that event is HR 511, which is 32 light years from earth.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
