One winter’s day I saw a fine full moon and tried to photograph it. When I looked to the photo I saw only a tiny little thing. Wondering why the moon appeared so large in the sky but so small in my photo led me to learn about moon illusion, an illusion that makes the moon appear larger when near the horizon then while higher up in the sky. This idea of moon illusion was the initial starting point of my piece but as I learnt more about the moon I found that she had many more mysteries.
One idea that caught me was that our moon has been hard done by the Age of Reason - once she was The Moon (a lone goddess, Selene, Diana, Luna, our sister world) and now, after we penetrated her mysteries, she has become but a sterile lump of rock whose very name became a generic. Even the stars when they turned out to be just like the Sun did not become suns. Our only natural satellite’s name was appropriated for all natural satellites and now she has no name. Another inspiration was to read over and over the Eric Carle’s children’s book Papa, please get the moon for me (ISBN 0-88708-177-0)…
It was the mixture of ideas that created this piece - when the optical illusion strikes perhaps the moon appears just to us larger near the horizon so we might reach out to her to find her lost name… Tension is sustained throughout the piece as the idea of illusion is developed and unresolved, as the search for the lost name of the moon is carried out.
This work was commissioned by the DGARTES - Ministry of Culture of Portugal and Aveiro University.
Sara Carvalho
