Fly me to the MOON

Bristol artist Luke Jerram is returning to the city of Gloucester this month with an exciting new community exhibition

- Candia McKormack

Earlier this year, Gloucester Culture Trust reached out to the residents of Gloucestershire to be part of an exciting art installation coming to Gloucester at the end of August. Individuals, groups and organisations from across the county were invited to write a sentence, phrase or poem to be submitted as part of Luke Jerram’s latest community exhibition, Of Earth and Sky.

Residents and visitors to the city in recent years will know Luke’s work well, as the Bristol-based artist is the creator of Museum of the Moon, an astonishing seven-metre in diameter internally-lit sphere using NASA imagery of the lunar surface. The sculpture came to Gloucester Cathedral in October 2019, and visitors flocked to experience the beautiful and surreal sight of the moon, that seemed to have ventured down from the night sky to take up temporary residence in the cavernous nave.

Luke was at the launch event himself, and seemed slightly bemused by the gasps of astonishment his work invoked in the gathered crowd. For his works, from a 90-foot-long E.coli sculpture to a giant aeolian harp, and a plant orchestra at Cambridge Botanical Gardens to political projections above Bristol, have been stopping us in our tracks for some years now.

“I was the sort of kid who would take apart radios and televisions to try and work out what was going on inside,” he says, “but they’d never go back together properly and work again afterwards. But that was the nature of it, really. I have a curious mind.”

Luke has never lost his curiosity, and is fascinated by how we all view life so very differently.

“I have an interest in visual perception,” he continues, “which affects the questions that I ask as an artist and has informed a number of the artworks I’ve made over the years.