In the city the waste light of industrial modernity blots out the night
sky. To see it, in all its clarity, is to realise that our globe is
hurtling mindlessly through the immensity of space.

from Galileo The starry messenger (1610)
I frequently observed heavenly bodies, both fixed stars and planets,
with incredible delight; and, when I saw their very great number, I
began to think about a method by which I might be able to measure their
distances apart, and at length I found one… I invite the attention of
all who are eager for true philosophy to the beginnings which led to
the sight of most important phenomena.

Many have looked up at the night sky and projected onto it their fears
and hopes. We read in Spear’s work a network of cognition, written
across the darkness, which scintillates with strange forces, which
conceals unknown worlds.

from James Clerk Maxwell Discourse on molecules (1873)
In the heavens we discover by their light, and by their light alone,
stars so distant from each other that no material thing can ever have
passed from one to the other; and yet this light, which is to us the
sole evidence of these distant worlds, tells us also that each of them
is built up of the same kind of molecules which we find on earth.

Knowledge of these distances arrives on earth in code, as faint signals
of light, as x-rays, as radio waves, which convey fragmented knowledge
of the intensity, location, and behaviour of objects in deep space. The
beauty of these codes is evident in Spear’s work, which imagines them
as a form of drawing, vibrating across the receptive surface of paper.
She adds pointillist abstraction to the complexity of overlaid signals,
evoking the noisy process of image capture.

from Jorge Luis Borges On Exactitude in Science (1946)
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that
the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the
map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those
Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds
struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which
coincided point for point with it.

These astronomical ciphers build up
an image of our universe, forever incomplete, always yet to be
perfected. Similarly Spear’s work plays with this palimpsest of
knowledge— erasing, over-writing, re-writing in order to unveil the
dynamism and mystery of the universe.

from Paul Davies Other worlds (1980)
Every atom is offered billions of trajectories by quantum
randomization, and in the many-worlds theory it accepts them all, so
every conceivable atomic arrangement will come about somewhere… Some
universes will be all darkness and chaos… while others will be seared
with radiation.

Felicity Spear’s works capture and manipulate a sample of those energy
tracks which have appeared in our time, our space. Out There – in light
of remote possibilities is a speculation on the beauty and mystery of
our window on the universe, the night sky.