Solar System Candle Holder

This sculptural work focuses on an interplay between traditional and digital forms of art. The piece is a candle holder that represents the solar system, with the sun as the tealight in the middle. Each of the eight panels corresponds with a planet, both by its painting and the image carved onto its surface.

Mercury is painted with pale grey and etched with the likeness of the Messenger probe, a robotic probe that orbited Mercury between 2011 and 2015.

Venus is painted with clumpy yellow, like its atmosphere, and etched with the Magellan spacecraft, which arrived at Venus in 1990.

Earth has swirls of blue-green around the pulsar map carried by the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft in the 1970s that tells anyone in the galaxy how to find our planet.

Mars is painted red like its soil and etched with the Curiosity Rover, the quirky robot that has captured all our hearts as it rambles over the planet's dusty surface.

Jupiter is a swirl of red and white, with the Juno spacecraft on its surface: the king of the gods, visited by his wife.

Saturn is a greenish yellow, visited by the Cassini probe, which only crashed into that planet's surface in 2017.

Uranus has the Voyager probe etched onto a surface of pale, icy blue. The Voyager was the last probe to pass by the planet on its way out of the solar system.

Neptune has been visited by no probe other than the Voyager, so its panel instead contains a diagram of the planets in order from the sun on a backdrop of bright blue, like the planet's gaseous surface.

The etchings on the panels were performed with a laser cutter. The structure that holds the panel was made in SketchUp and printed with a stereolithographic 3D printer. The panels were cut apart by hand and then painted with hand-mixed oil paint and cooked to ensure the staying power of the paint.