What’s On

Lunar Distance is part of SpaceFest, a celebration of Science Week in Cork. This FREE exhibit is open to the public from Saturday 08 November through Wednesday 12 November from 11am to 7pm at Marina Market.

Lunar Distance explores our relationship to the moon as the human imagination’s gateway to space, and to the science, art and stories we create under its spell. The exhibition brings together artists, scientists, and dreamers stirred by the complexity of the night sky, all shown under the glow of a 5-meter moon.

Moonward Bound

• Like Gold to Airy Thinness Beat: A miniature golden sculpture that orbited Earth aboard the International Space Station. Created by by Gillian Fitzpatrick and Dr. Justin Donnelly, it will soon journey to the Moon Gallery, the first permanent art gallery on the Moon.
• Lumo’s Moon: Macnas, Ireland’s acclaimed street art and spectacle theatre company, will bring its vibrant troupe of drummers, stilt walkers, and puppets to Cork City for a performance highlighting the gradual disappearance of the corncrake across Ireland. A five-meter tall glowing moon and soundscape installation inspired by the performance will be on exhibit.
• How Many Moons? Hundreds of tiny imagined planetary satellites created by schoolchildren in East Cork with artist Chris Finnegan.

Interstellar Futures

• Speculative works imagine futures beyond Earth: Andrew McSweeney’s morphing Martian landscapes, Dr. Siobhan McGibbon’s making (odd) kin through multi-species futures in the world of Xenophon, and Marie Bryan’s fictitious parallel universes.
• Counting Cows from Space: An exploration of Earth Observation images from agricultural applications to accidental art, and the future of satellite technology.

Light from the Past

• Reach for the Stars: An exhibition of award-winning astrophotography from DIAS’s national 2025 competition.

• Hanging Space (Space to Connect) textile work interweaving drawings and NASA imagery by Olive Barret
• Intricate altered paper on aluminium evokes the Voyager 1 spacecraft in Voyager Flyby by Sarah Lincoln

Talking to the Stars

• Our Side of the Moon, a film by 2022 SpaceFest artists in residence Emilia Tapprest and Valerie Van Zuijlan, in which characters communicate through “moonbouncing,” sending voices off the lunar surface and back again.
• Voice Notes for Spás Amach (Outer Space) invites visitors to both listen to and record their own voice notes for space using retrofitted vintage satellite groundstation technology.
• Space Cadets Corner: Readers from 0 to infinity will find a selection of space-themed books hand-picked by Cork City Libraries staff, under a whimsical Cow Jumping Over the Moon by VistaMilk SFI Research Centre artist-in-residence Maria McKinney.

#SpaceFest is produced by @greywoodarts as part of #ScienceWeek2025, and is funded by the stars at Taighde Éireann – @researchireland