Sonia LeimerCosmic Dust
Current Exhibition
Jencks Foundation
London
United Kingdom
2 Oct 2024 – 12 Sept 2025
read inGerman
Artist Sonia Leimer took a microscopic lens to The Cosmic House to explore the migratory system of ‘cosmic dust’. While space dust obscures our view of outer space through telescopes, its microscopic image has become an important source of knowledge for scientists studying the formation of our Solar system. Every year, thousands of tons of this cosmic matter – tiny particles known as micrometeorites – fall to Earth. These dark, often magnetic particles, smaller than 0.1mm, surround us everywhere in our human environment. Over the past year, Leimer has collected dust from the roof of The Cosmic House and with the support of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, she analysed the collected material to uncover a fascinating array of dust. Through microscope photography, Leimer captured their intricate forms, using them as inspiration for her ‘Dust Buddies’ sculptures made of bronze, aluminium and glass. The sculptures, which Leimer places in the Architecture Library of The Cosmic House, bring into view something that is typically invisible, and which connects the human and the cosmic scales. Leimer’s new film records her microscopic journey across the domestic landscape of The Cosmic House, the petri dishes in the laboratories of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, and the vast symbolic landscape created by Maggie Keswick and Charles Jencks in The Garden of Cosmic Speculation in Portrack, Scotland. In the film, Leimer's voice guides the viewer through the house and beyond as she reads a letter addressed to one of her scientific collaborators. Her subjective and poetic narration suggests intricate connections between the disparate scales of the microscope and the universe, and between the unknown and that of the already familiar. The exhibition is produced in collaboration with Phileas – The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art with the generous support of legero united | con-tempus.eu.
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