Author: NiamhMcGuinne

[Hu]Manned Mission is a pseudoscientific exploration into humans’ interactions with the moon. An appraisal of lunar myths and missions, combining fact with fiction to create new narratives. It offers an invitation to reconnect and communicate with your moon, to consider the importance of language in your quest, because … it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories (Haraway, 2016).

The moon is a distant object, gazed upon by more humans than any other solid object in the universe (Morton, 2019), yet its surface has only been walked on by 12 white American men. The only people to have experienced it first-hand. However, does that make the rest of our knowledge less valid?

Etching and pastel on paper, 46 x 38cm

In this  hybrid etching and pastel drawing the figure is situated behind the eyes at a remove from the audience to suggest an interior condition and position. There is a link to body armouring of trauma – the body keeping the score being a familiar term in psychology. It seems that the condition was linked to embodied trauma and these women did not have a voice either in their treatment or in society – they were only able to express this in a non-verbal communication – in the guise of illness.