Hidden Heroes Exhibit
Morehead Planetarium and Science Center
Chapel Hill, NC
Mission Control alcove design, Photo retouching and colorization
For this project, our team was asked to design an exhibit about the female mathematicians who worked as “human computers” to program the first American flight to the moon.
I restored the images of the mathematicians, colorizing the black and white images and refining the details so they could be printed life-size.
I also designed an alcove to feature a video about programmer Dorothy Vaughan, which I imagined as appearing on one of the screens at the Apollo 11 Mission Control in Houston, TX. The exhibit dressing was expressed as overlapping layers of Sintra to provoke a feeling of depth.
Light as a Stone
metal wire and wood, 2021
Stones are thought of as heavy, motionless, unremarkable. Here they are reimagined in wire to be light, responsive to slight air movements, and framed as objects of attention. With this piece, I wanted to pay attention to simplicity while also playing with contrasts: the heaviness of the stones modeled vs. the lightness of the wire. The generality of the idea of a stone vs. the specificity of these individual stones.
Looking at the open top and bottom stones, different organic shapes emerge and meld together as the sculpture turns. With the middle, shaded stone, the viewing experience shifts between interiority and exteriority as the different sides of the sculpture are revealed and the sense of 3-dimensional space changes.
