From Cardiff student to internationally acclaimed artist, Luke Jerram has spent a career turning science into spectacle. As his monumental Gaia finds a permanent home at Techniquest, Antonia LeVay talks to him about climate change, the collision of art and science, AI, taking risks and what happens when you put the Earth in a room.
For an artist whose work has appeared around the globe, Luke Jerram’s latest chapter has a pleasing circularity to it. He studied fine art in Cardiff, graduating in 1997, before moving to Bristol. Now Gaia, his spectacular six-metre representation of planet Earth, is finding a permanent Welsh home at Techniquest as the Cardiff science discovery centre celebrates its 40th anniversary.
“It’s really cool,” he says when we speak in late September, just after he’s returned to the UK from New York. “I’m very passionate about science communication, so to have this artwork on permanent display in Cardiff is brilliant. It feels like I’ve made a big circle.” Remarkably, despite notching up around a thousand exhibitions in some 50 countries, this will be Jerram’s first artwork on permanent display in Wales, although they’ve been hosted on a temporary basis in Cardiff’s National Museum and Swansea Minster this year.
Jerram’s art has spanned many disciplines: he first became widely known for Play Me, I’m Yours, which placed street pianos in cities for anyone to play. Since then, his practice has encompassed installation, sculpture, science, engineering and public participation, but at the heart of it all is accessibility.
“I try to make artwork that can be enjoyed by everyone,” he explains – and as his audiences have grown, so has his sense that art can carry more than aesthetic weight. “Art can have a place to play in terms of the communication of important messages.”
It’s a philosophy that runs through Gaia. Created using detailed – and freely available – NASA imagery, the internally illuminated globe slowly rotates above its audience. At Techniquest, each centimetre represents roughly 18 kilometres of the Earth’s surface. The physical scale is important: a far cry from merely looking at an image of the planet on a screen, in person you’re confronted by it.
“We’ve been looking at the surface of the moon for about 200,000 years,” says Jerram, who has also recreated the satellite as the seven-metre Museum Of The Moon, “but it’s quite new for us to be able to see Earth from space in this way – and to realise how beautiful and fragile it is, and that we’re all on it together.” Pull back far enough, he points out, and the entirety of human history is taking place on one tiny blue speck surrounded by black space. “There’s nowhere else to go.”
The environmental message within Gaia has inevitably become more urgent. When Jerram graduated, climate change was largely discussed as something that was going to happen. Then it became something happening elsewhere – disappearing islands, heatwaves in the Global South. Now, he says, the consequences are increasingly tangible in Britain. “We can feel it. We’re having massive heatwaves and droughts, crops beginning to fail.”
But Gaia isn’t intended to lecture its audience, indeed it leaves room for interpretation. For a child, it may simply be the first time they’ve really understood the Earth as a globe. Someone else might contemplate climate change; another may imagine themselves as an astronaut looking back at home. “There are all sorts of different ways that you can interpret this artwork, depending on what you bring to it,” says the artist; “to me, that’s important.”
That openness extends to what happens around the installation. Jerram’s globes have provided backdrops for orchestras, choirs, pottery classes and more; Techniquest is programming activities including yoga and silent discos around Gaia, which suits him fine. “I like making artwork and leaving space for other people to be creative around it.”
Sound is another integral layer. Jerram commissioned Bristol-based composer Dan Jones to create the accompanying composition, which incorporates NASA material, astronauts discussing the “overview effect”, the sea, whale calls and the imagined cacophony of Earth’s radio stations heard as though retreating into space. “The music is there to help connect the sculpture with the surrounding architecture,” he says; it also subtly guides audiences towards ideas around climate, space travel and our relationship with the planet.
Jerram’s fascination with that collision goes back much further than Gaia. Growing up in the Gloucestershire countryside, he wanted to be an inventor and had a university place to study engineering before choosing art instead. (“I still use my skills and understanding of engineering and science, and combine those with art.”) Studying at the University Of Wales Institute (now called Cardiff Met), his interest in visual perception, partly informed by being red/green colourblind, led him to create Retinal Memory Volume: an installation using light and afterimages to effectively construct sculptures inside the viewer’s vision.
That curiosity has never really gone away. One day Jerram might collaborate with a glassblower, another with a hot-air balloon manufacturer, composer or metalworker. By no means a solitary artist, he says that most things around us exist because hundreds of people have pooled their expertise – why should art be different? His projects can begin as tiny experiments and evolve into international bodies of work: the Glass Microbiology sculpture series, for example, grew from a single piece based on the HIV virus into works now held by museums around the world.
Jerram has also increasingly used the success of his work to create a tangible legacy. Income generated through touring projects has helped support schools in Bristol and projects overseas: in Sierra Leone, collaborations have included solar-powered streetlights, art workshops and restoring a primary school serving around 1,000 children. “Art isn’t just necessarily about entertainment,” he says, “you can do some good things in the world too.”
Having recreated planet Earth, the moon and the sun – Helios, a depiction of the latter, has toured widely this year – the next move is towards the inverse extreme of size. Jerram has recently completed Pollinarium, an immersive dome inspired by the microscopic structure of a pollen grain which uses lenses to draw light through its surface and project it inside; it is, he reckons, “like being inside a bee’s head!” He’s also made a tactile Moon sculpture using NASA topographical data, translating its craters and valleys into stainless steel – created for the Royal Observatory in London and two metres wide.
Scale, perception and our relationship with things we can’t ordinarily experience remain recurring obsessions. Even AI is beginning to find its way into Jerram’s process –experimenting with it to visualise potential artworks – but, troubled by the way artists’ imagery can be scraped from the internet and exploited by technology companies, for now he calls it “a mixed bag”.
For all the extraordinary finished pieces, Jerram is keen to puncture the illusion that creating them is effortless – new ideas mean risk, and things can certainly go wrong. Unlike a product designer who might make scores of prototypes before unveiling the finished object, an artist often gets one very public attempt. “To do anything new involves risk-taking,” he says, “and things don’t often go to plan…”
And perhaps that’s where art and science finally converge, using curiosity as an energy. “Artists and scientists are often interested in the world,” Jerram says. “There’s a mutual and shared interest between arts and science – that curiosity about knowledge.” Standing beneath Gaia, however, you don’t need a degree in either discipline to understand its impact.
Gaia is viewable now at Techniquest in Cardiff Bay.
Info: here
words ANTONIA LEVAY
