Nordic winter days: sparse light, long nights. Preparing for upcoming symposium within the Praxis project at Oulu Art Museum in March. Today, I’m also very happy and grateful for the travel grant approved yesterday by Kulturfonden för Sverige och Finland – kiitos! Tack!!

Hours spent reading, painting, printing, stitching… my mind floating between the concept of (abstract) space – iconized in world maps of various projections – and individual itineraries, tales of personal experiences in specific places…

…representing two complementary perspectives on our lived and living world(s); both wondrously fused together in pictures sent from the crews of NASA’s Apollo space missions.* Here below, the very first photo of planet Earth as viewed from beyond orbit – captured from Apollo 8 on Dec. 21st 1968, by astronaut Bill Anders. Upon returning, Anders commented: “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

Photo credit: NASA / restoration by Toby Ord

* Read more about the Apollo voyages, images and photo restoration project: BBC Sky at Night Magazine (published January 23, 2024)