Protected: Moon Mania PechKucha Talk (by sarah)

Gaia – Llanthony 2019 (by sarah)

This weekend starting tomorrow there is going to be a giant Earth floating in the grounds of the historical site Llanthony Secunda Priory and Moon Mania Mega Make my community textiles project will be there with it 🙂

It will be there from 10 am till 5 pm for three days:

Friday 28th of June Saturday 29th of June Sunday 30th of June

I will be there from 1 pm on the Friday, 2 pm on the Saturday and all day Sunday. If the weathers nice I will be outside by the coffee van if it's bad I'll be inside. This will also be the first proper outing of Moon Memories where I hope to snag people and get them to tell me their tales of the moon landings and space race or what their aspirations for the future of space exploration is. This is for a legacy piece which will result in a book and website and my hope is to archive these stories properly so that they are not lost to the sands of time (or moon dust!).

Gaia is part of Gloucester's amazing Earth and Moon festival which will be going on through out the summer and autumn and includes events at the Libraries including their annual reading challenge which is space themed, cinema at the GuildHall, the accompanying Moon to Gaia will be in the Cathedral later in the Year, and of course last but not least there is the Museum of Gloucester which has a Moon Exhibition which is opening this Saturday (29th of June 2019) starting with a kids craft corner focused on International Asteroid Day. I myself will be doing talks, creative writing that's moon themed as well as rock handling at the Museum.

Some of the events can be found in the SoMac brochure, some in the museums and libraries and Guildhalls own brochures 🙂

I also have various poetry, arts and science talks planned starting on Tuesday with a little PechaKucha talk at Liquor and Chow.

Now back to Gaia - this is an amazing installation that is going on a tour around the UK and is made by Luke Gerram with imagery from NASA. I am very excited to have the chance to be involved for Moon Mania!

Gaia is the name of the Greek Goddess who made/is the Earth, that which gave birth to everything, in Earth and Planetary Sciences we have the Gaia Hypothesis which takes the planet as a kind of mega organism with each part - trees, animals, sea, weather - all being part of the whole and what affects one affects the other. Computer Gamers will also be well aware of these concepts!

I have a mini obsession with Gaia so here is one of my favourite art making and concept creating videos about another fabulous art inspired by Mother Earth:

Rebirth of Gaea

Oh and I am looking for as many people as possible to be involved with the Mega Make!

Moon Mega Make – Update! (by sarah)

This week the Moon Mega Make community textiles project has been out twice in both Gloucester and Cheltenham 🙂 Someone even started stitching the Sun which made me very happy!

Part of the outings was also to put up posters and give out flyers and have further meetings about Moon Mania. This lot of flyers cover the Spoken Word and Creative Writing aspect of Moon Mania which currently comprises 4 events, the first of which also includes the Mega Make at the First Thursday in Cheltenham - an Arts Quarter event that happens once a month unsurprisingly on the First Thursday where the Wilson Museum and Art Gallery is open late and July's event is Moon Themed for the 50th anniversary of the first human on the moon!

There is lots of awesome moon themed stuff happening 6-9 pm 🙂

Cookes Coffee and Curios is also supporting the Moon Mania Mega Make giving us a space for the Moon Meets and popping my posters and flyers up in their wonderful coffee shop! The photo below is of my mum stitching away over a coffee.

And last but certainly not least - Gloucester City is having a wonderful Earth and Moon Festival opening with Gaia a giant inflatable Earth that is going into one of the loveliest historical landmarks around - Llantony Sucunda Priory. This amazing artwork is by Luke Jerram and is open to the public on the 28-30 of June 2019. Check out the Facebook event here. To my utter joy I get to take the Mega Make along to this event - extract timings for me are yet to be called but I am hoping to make an appearance on all three days so if you are local come along see the art and add a stitch!

The Moon Mania Mega Make even ended up at the Gloucestershire Steam Punk Society's get together this month where there were cogs and moon chatting and much much more!

And last but certainly not least my prototype t-shirt has arrived - I don't like the black rectangle around the moon so am attempting to get rid of that in future prints but this one shall be mine for events to go along with the space dresses, moon skirts and leggings 🙂 I am hoping to sell these to help fund some of the other Moon Mania events and I would like to be able to give these to all the poets and story writers who are providing works for the Moon Miscellany!

Haiku Poetry Day (by sarah)

Moth guide bright, globe that glows -
through to slivered nothing,
Lunar is your name

The Young Adult Reading Group who meet in Waterstones Gloucester sometimes at the same time as my monthly poetry events asked me if I'd written poetry lately as it was Haiku Poetry Day - I hadn't because I have been too wrapped up in my emotions to write anything creative unless it is about my dad and then I tend to get over emotional and have been unable to finish a single piece.

But part of dad's legacy is my writing so I have been trying with novels and comic books and poetry but mainly just staring blankly.

I managed to write this - it is not a Haiku in the way Europeans understand Haikus and it certainly is not a Japanese Haiku but I love Japanese poetry and am obsessed with the moon at the moment so I tried to make something that bit into that essence of existence.

It is slightly different to the tweet version I sent were I wrote Lunars as I think it works better this way.

If you want to know more about the poetry form of Haiku I would suggest you start with wikipedia and then go on from there!

The date of the newly discovered (by me) poetry day is the 17th of April so I am hoping to catch it a little better and more prepared next year.

Take Me To the Moon (by sarah)

So I am doing a lot of research into the moon landings and stuff for various events this year to mark 50 years since Apollo 11 but with came the shock that somehow until last night I had never given up on my childhood ambitions - top year of infant school we did an assembly and we had to say what we wanted to be when we were older - I had three things I wanted to be:

1) an Opera Singer - my reasoning for this was you get to sing, act, dance, make and wear awesome costumes, write plays and songs and create amazing sets and props (I was 7 and had massive problems with my hearing)

2) Be an archaeologist and palaeontologist - I even took a fossil with me that a teacher informed me wasn't a real fossil as it was just an indentation - I already knew more about fossils than the teacher. (ironically I knew that the two fields of archaeology and palaeontology were distinct but related things but not that opera singers didn't make their own dresses).

3) An Astronaut - I kind of assumed I would at least get to go to the Moon and Mars to look for fossils and that I would then write books on it. I even resisted a diagnosis of asthma because I knew that would exclude you from the space programme.

I have managed pretty much all the first two options to some degree or other though stretching it slightly as I've only ever done Light Opera ie Musical Theatre - though I did get to sing with a proper Opera Singer at the Royal Festival Hall when I was a teenager.

Last night I was awoken with the realisation that I am actually never going to go into space - somehow I had still been holding onto the notion that when I was older I would somehow be fit enough and good enough to go. I was born with a heart murmur so there was actually never any chance of me going even if the space programmes had continued to send people up (though I think they could have done a lot of the moon stuff a lot differently and safer but it would have taken longer). It was that thing where I realised I am the sort of age of those original astronauts, when they were flying to the moon and back.

The closest I ever got to space was the meteorites at the Natural History Museum and then a lunar meteorite at Birkbeck/UCL but I never got to finish that project due to my health so actually worry that me blasting the thing with lasers actually made it less of a useful sample to others who came after me - I still get to say I blasted moon rock with green lasers I suppose.

I like collecting sets so am finding my inability to be an astronaut incredibly frustrating!