Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts Quarterly

Q43: Intertidal Encounters

Guest Editor: Sarah Blissett

“On 13 July 2022 a strange harvest occurred by the light of a full moon. In my garden in Somerset, in raised beds made from pallet collars, I had painstakingly raised six heritage and three modern varieties of oats. Now, with a pair of kitchen scissors, I was taking them in by the handful, bundling and labelling, hanging to cure through the record-breaking heatwave (MET OFFICE 2022) that would arrive that weekend.  On the day of the harvest, British newspapers reported images released by NASA from its James Webb Space Telescope, showing “the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe so far.” and covering a view of space which was described as “the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground” (NASA 2022). In this ‘grain of sand’, the telescope had captured incredible composite ‘photos’ of the 4.6 billion year old galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 whose immense gravitational field has the effect of bending light like a camera lens and bringing into focus other ancient clusters and galaxies beyond it.”