Cosmic performance and sculpture artist Sarah Fortais to create exhibition at UCL East

The announcement coincides with the start of this year’s World Space Week (4-10 October), an annual UN-backed celebration of science and technology and their contribution humanity.

Artist Sarah Fortais has been selected by a panel through an open call process which invited submissions based on the theme of space for public exhibition in our Marshgate building on our UCL East campus in 2025.

Sarah Fortais received a Fine Art PhD from the Slade School of Fine Art (2018), where she built spacesuits for animals, borrowed NASA moon rocks, and created strategies to define what it means to call a person or thing ‘cool’.

Sarah says issues around space debris will be a focus of her work:

“I initially answered the expression of interest because I am an artist that has been interested in space junk and the Overview Effect for over 9 years and getting the chance to create work in the new Marshgate building on the UCL East campus sounded like an exciting opportunity to me.

“I have actually been creating space-themed artworks in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park site for more than13 years (since I moved to the UK) primarily using discarded materials, and so I am looking forward to using our own terrestrial debris to help tell the story about cosmic debris left by satellites and activity in space.

“A particularly exciting aspect of my proposal for World Space Week 2025 is a series of free hand casting workshops that I will be hosting in the borough of Newham. By using hands to visualise space debris I think we can start to humanise this ecological problem and begin to look at it as something manageable through time by working together through multiple generations.

“At the end of the World Space Week 2025 exhibition, participants will be able to take home their hand castings and hopefully we'll all come away feeling as though we celebrated the potential for future off-world living.”

Marshgate is home to a huge Gaia globe permanent artwork by Luke Jerram. The 8m in diameter globe hangs and gently rotates in the building’s huge atrium and is the driver behind the Gaia Public Programme, also reflecting the focus on innovation to protect the planet, which is at the heart of research, teaching and learning on the UCL East campus.

Sarah Fortais continued:

“Part of my interest in the Marshgate site has to do with its historical connection to sheep grazing, as well as the fact that it is home to brand new UCL Institute of Making facilities, and the permanent installation of Luke Jerram's Gaia sculpture.

“I'd like to combine all three interests with a week-long performance that includes grazing a 'cosmic flock' of life-sized sheep on the Park and producing an accompanying exhibition that shares knowledge about the surprising, sad, and thought-provoking history of animals in space.

"I am also looking forward to collaborating with the UCL community, especially the UCL Centre for Outer Space Studies and the Lunga 6 Mission Crew. Lunga 6 was the UK's first Analogue Space Research Mission (in May 2022) and was designed by UCL PhD student-turned-lecturer Dr. Myles Harris. I am looking forward to telling the story of this mission through a mixed media exhibition.

“All in all, I am very excited to work with UCL and the borough of Newham on a collection of works that should get both collaborators and viewers engaged with the Marshgate space. I am also looking forward to getting the brand new Marshgate space a little messy as we experiment with different kinds of making throughout the year.”

Dr. David (Jeeva) Jeevendrampillai, who is an anthropologist of Outer Space and Director of the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) Centre for Outer Space Studies, was on the selection panel that chose Sarah Fortais for this commission:

“Outer Space affects us all, from the technology we use to the setting of our bodily biorhythms as we wake each morning as the Earth turns to face the Sun. The subtly of our relationships to outer space are often hidden. The artist practice of the UCL Space Week Artist 2024, Sarah Fortais magnificently draws our attention to our spacey relations.

“As a UCL Slade School graduate and a former artist in residence at the Centre of Outer Space Studies, Sarah has used bricolage methodology to bring together materials to help us think through space and the world around us. Her space suits for animals ask us to ruminate on how many more animals, as the subjects of scientific research, have been the main space travellers from Earth.

“Her work from the UK Space Analogue mission used in situ materials from a Scottish Island that was re-imagined as a Martian landscape for space training to cast death masks and think through how we might conduct rituals in the remoteness of space.

“Overall, her work is inventive, engaging and goes beyond reflecting on space but challenges us to rethink the co-ordinates of what we know and how we feel about our relationship to all manner of things that, perhaps, we didn’t even realise, are entwinned with space.”

This project is managed and supported by UCL East’s Public Art and Cultural & Community Engagement team, which is building partnerships between east London communities and UCL staff and students, and creating opportunities to communicate UCL's research, identity and relationship to the world through public art. 

Image: Tourist, Sarah Fortais

Find out more about the UCL Gaia Public Programme