A beautiful handmade leoporello book of Simon Norfolk's photographs of American satellites and missiles shooting in the sky. Each book contains five digital C-type glossy prints enclosed within a specially made slip case of Japanese mohair.
Each copy is signed and numbered in pencil by Simon Norfolk, in an edition of 95.
For several years now, my work has been an exploration of the Sublime in the landscape; those sights whose boundless beauty is countervailed by feelings of fearfulness and powerlessness. There is an appalling beauty in what human ingenuity can achieve when (given endless resources) it thinks only of more elegant and more brilliant ways to kill people. Nowhere is this clearer than what I call the Military Sublime - for example the nuclear missiles and satellite launches pictured here.
This dialectic runs throughout the world of modern rocketry. Their launch vehicles are massive cans of metal and tonnes of industrial fuels; yet the satellites and missiles themselves are infinitely delicate packages of microchips and sensors. A practical world of the limits of rocket science is conjoined to a world of weightlessness and omniscience.
