Ultra Deep Field
Ultra Deep Field is a series inspired by constellations. Featuring people, animals, and places in my local area, almost all of these images were created with the lens pointed toward the corresponding constellation’s precise location in the sky at that exact moment. Certain photographs employ an in-camera process using a flash, retroreflective motion-capture dots, and a six-point star lens filter. This technique mimics the diffraction spikes seen in the James Webb Space Telescope’s infrared imagery of stars and galaxies, collapsing the distance between my immediate surroundings and stars thousands of light-years away.
For millennia, stars have inspired humanity to create stories. Mesopotamian and Greek cultures feature narratives of mythological heroes, creatures, and animals placed in the sky by the gods as constellations, immortalizing their actions through light. In Ultra Deep Field, the camera serves a similar purpose, capturing and monumentalizing my immediate surroundings, elevating the local and mundane to the ethereal status of a constellation.
My fascination with the cosmos began in childhood, looking through my father’s telescope and contemplating the vastness of space. To view light that has travelled millions of years is to encounter the outer limits of our scientific understanding of time and physics. My images treat my local environment like an ultra deep field, seeking to chart moments and minutiae that typically go unnoticed. As physicist Carlo Rovelli writes, “[a] scientist is someone who lives immersed in the awareness of our deep ignorance, in direct contact with our own innumerable limits.” This project seeks to evoke the same feeling of brushing up against the mystery and unknowability of not only our universe but our own familiar surroundings.
This project was made possible thanks to Innovation PEI’s Arts Grants Funding.