Dark Skies

‘Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive’ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

This exhibition of the work of artist and photographer Judy Goldhill explores our complex relationship to darkness and the night. Traditionally, in literature, art and film, dark skies offer a motif of dread and foreboding. As darkness falls it transforms the everyday into the unknown, creating a space to project our fears, both real and imagined.

Goldhill’s photographs remind us that culture and experience can be very different things. Her images of dark skies are full of beauty and wonder, allowing us to place ourselves in the universe and travel back in time. Before we turned our backs on the night, flooding it with light, we looked to the stars and their constellations to trace out the ancient myths and stories of our ancestors’ imaginations and used them as navigational tools to guide us on our way.

In the twenty-first century, we find dark skies like so much of our natural environment, are fragile, threatened by light pollution from below, and planes and satellites from above. This exhibition set in the beautiful Bannau Brycheiniog, an International Dark Sky Reserve, reveals the amazing variety of phenomena visible to the naked eye. I hope it inspires you to step outside tonight and look up.

Ro Spankie