Space and our relationship with it loomed large in the public consciousness in 2019, following the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landings. Space travel demonstrates human and technological capabilities yet reminds us of our limits. Because most people are unlikely to visit, images and testimonies from space can be so distanced from our lives as to feel almost unreal.

Spanish-born, Yorkshire-based artist Hondartza Fraga is interested in our relationship with scientific images of space and the ways in which artistic responses to these might give us new meanings. “I’ve always been interested in space,” she explains. “I’m interested in the places we can’t access very easily, so we need images of them, such as deep space, deep sea and the poles. These are places we look at from afar. Space is the ultimate place we cannot inhabit – but we can see it with the help of technology.”

Working in a photorealist style that she says is “very open about its relationship to photography,” Fraga’s drawings are characterised by meticulous attention to detail. Her eye has previously been drawn to mechanical aids for advancing human understanding: in 2016 she drew a globe per day, observing the subtle similarities and differences in an once commonplace yet now archaic method for mapping and navigating the world. During a residency at Jodrell Bank Observatory, she created a series of hybrid machine-natural forms, juxtaposing the high-tech Lovell telescope with its incongruous setting in the Cheshire countryside. Specimens (2018-ongoing) is a series of drawings of objects that “carry humans to remote spaces.” One image depicts a submersible, which travels to the deepest part of the ocean, whilst another shows the craft that took astronauts to the moon, “the furthest we’ve physically been.”

At the moment she is working with more abstract material: a remarkable set of almost 400,000 ‘raw images’ of Saturn beamed back by the Cassini voyager between 2004 and 2017, all of which are openly available online via the NASA website.

“If you ask what Saturn looks like, anyone can describe it on a basic level,” Fraga says. However, seen by the naked eye it is “just a dot, like another star – we need technology to see it.[…]

More: Rings of Saturn: Hondartza Fraga’s Cassini Images — the Fourdrinier