Life Size Mars

Life Size Mars is an ongoing series of tiny pencil drawings that reproduce sections of the Martian surface at a 1:1 scale. While we are familiar with spectacular images of Mars as a distant planetary landscape, the work focuses on small fragments of terrain, bringing them into an intimate and tangible scale. The drawings explore the relationship between technological images and embodied acts of looking. By translating remote scientific imagery through hand-drawn marks, the work considers how technologies allow us to encounter places beyond direct human experience, while also revealing the processes of selection, translation and interpretation involved in making distant worlds visible. This work is part of my wider investigation into scale, materiality, and the relationship between images, objects and acts of observation.

The series began with a close-up image captured by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity of the small spherules near Fram Crater known as “blueberries”. This drawing is now part of the permanent collection of The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds. In 2024, a new group of drawings was commissioned by Our Big Picture, Grimsby, for my solo exhibition there, allowing me to continue my exploration of the relationship between scientific imagery and drawing.