Flores lateris obscuri lunae

collage and gouache 2026 22″h, 30″w

The Artemis II mission traced a figure-eight arc through space — a gravitational slingshot that carried its crew behind the Moon and back toward Earth without ever touching down. This work mourns, with tenderness and quiet humor, the botanical discoveries that went unmade. Flores lateris obscuri lunae imagines the secret ecosystem flourishing in that unvisited terrain: an alien garden dense with impossible blooms.  The collage draws its raw material from the very science that brought humanity so close and no further — diagrams of the figure-eight trajectory are cut into flora, their orbital mathematics transformed into organic form; photographs of gold-ion collisions, subatomic events of extraordinary violence and beauty, are reborn as delicate flora; charts of the Moon’s phases and its elliptical orbit around the Earth become the shapes of flowers that could only grow in a place no one has yet stood. What science passes by, art stops to tend.

• Diagrams
• Historic documents