Across Space and Time

Across Space and Time
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“Across Space and Time”
Etching and Aquatint
Fusion of Art and Science Project

Artist Statement:
Choosing black holes as the subject of a work of art presented a unique challenge – how do you go about depicting an object that is defined by the fact that you can’t see it? The concept for the work, therefore, had to go beyond simple illustration, so I delved into the history and science supporting the phenomena in search of a more abstract angle from which to approach the subject. What I found was an exciting world for the imagination to inhabit – one in which the fabric of time and space itself is so altered that you could travel to distant corners of the universe, or even into other universes, and then return home, arriving before you left.

In 1915, Albert Einstein developed the theory of general relativity, which explained gravity as the curving of the 4-demensional fabric of spacetime around areas of mass. Within a few months, another physicist, Karl Schwarzschild, used Einstein’s theories to suggest the existence of point-like areas of space which possess such enormous amounts of concentrated mass that space and time are infinitely warped around them, trapping everything, including light, inside their powerful gravitational fields and distorting the dimension of time to extreme lengths. Objects that fall within the boundaries of these areas are doomed to be drawn unstoppably towards the dense “singularity” at the center where the flow of time comes to an end and space is hopelessly wound into a single point.

These areas of space, which came to be known as black holes, have inspired many scientific theories as well as works of science fiction over the years since their discovery, and the dramatic distortions in the behavior of time and space near the center of black holes have given rise to countless theories about travel across time and space. In particular is the work of Albert Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen, who discovered a solution to Einstein’s general relativity equations that allowed, on paper at least, the creation of what came to be called “Einstein-Rosen Bridges” or “Wormholes”: theoretical “tunnels” that connect a black hole to a white hole (which is essentially the mathematical reversal of a black hole) located at another point in the fabric of spacetime – maybe in the past, or the future, or in some distant corner of the universe, or even perhaps in another universe entirely – allowing rapid travel through space and time.

While these bridges across time and space work marvelously well mathematically, they have since been proven all but impossible according to what we currently know about the laws of nature. They have, however, provided rich material for the imagination, capturing the public eye in such works as Carl Sagan's influential science fiction novel Contact.

My work, “Across Space and Time,” presents imagery inspired by the science and science fiction surrounding the phenomena of black holes; dealing with the concrete, tangible world of reality as we know it, and with the imagination, inspired by science and awakened to possibilities beyond the limits of our narrow frame of reference – traveling across space and time in an epic journey of discovery and wonder.