Fay Ballard – We are Stardust, (2025)

Celestial light points and doodles emerge against the deep black of layers of sumi ink in ‘We are Stardust’, 2025. We have panned out from the isolated planets of the series ‘Another World’ to take in a flavour of the many actual and possible worlds. The observable universe is probably a small proportion of the whole, but even so we can detect an estimated two trillion galaxies, each containing some 100 billion stars, so yielding 200 billion trillion stars in total. That’s the context for Carl Sagan’s famous observation that ‘The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself’ – for the elements essential for life, like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, were synthesized within the cores of stars. And that, at least from an atheist point of view, is where we shall return, the mystery lying in the wonder of nature rather than the incomprehensibility of a god.