Kirsten Downie

The island of Lismore (great garden in Gaelic), one of the Inner Hebrides at the end of the Great Glen, transports you to another world, dotted with Iron Age ruins and surrounded by clear blue waters, perfectly reflecting the sky.
When looking through the photos I’d taken on my visit to Lismore in February, I was drawn to the photo taken from the pier overlooking the water towards the island. and how clear the mirrored reflection of the sky was in the water. It was at this point I started to develop ideas of observing the sky, rather than the landscape, and allow for a moment of slowing down, and reflection.
The idea of studying the cosmos was a repeating theme of my childhood. Family visits to Florida always included a trip to the Kennedy Space Centre, which inspire my brother to study Astrophysics, which meant going along to astronomy talks at various universities, and visiting him on work experience at Kielder Observatory.
One of the theories I remember from a talk we attended was the cosmic mirror universe theory, which stated that at the point of the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, another universe was created, mirroring ours. In this other universe, everything is the same, but due to time being a linear object, time moves backwards. As we move further forward in time, they move further backwards.
This intervention aims to physically demonstrate the cosmic mirror theory, by transporting the user backwards through time to the early universe, a time before our galaxy came into existence. I want to create an intervention where the only thing visible to the user is the cosmos, allowing for a period of reflection uninterrupted by man-made distractions.