Art for Artemis – Tessa

ESA has teamed up with eight art schools around Europe and challenged their students to produce art inspired by Artemis, lunar exploration and the European Service Module that will provide the power, propulsion, water and air for the astronauts on board.

Students made 24 artworks that we will showcase on the Orion blog over the coming months. Using a variety of techniques and from many different cultural backgrounds, the artists have thought about what human spaceflight to the Moon and beyond signifies.

This artwork was made by Tessa Kugel from the Beaux Arts de Paris in France and selected by an international jury to accompany the third European Service Module on its first part of the voyage to the Moon, from the Bremen integration hall in Bremen, Germany, to NASA's Kennedy Space Center, USA:

"On the occasion of the call for projects ART for Artemis of ESA and Airbus for the mission Artemis, I  designed this image as a nod to the space exploration posters of the last century. A comet, a shuttle or a beam connects Earth and Moon, united thanks to this international mission.

The picture frame is inspired by Scivias, Hildegard’s Codex illuminatus Bingen (around 1180),  representing the cosmos with the Sun, the Moon, and the stars. The light beam and the background, when to them, are illustrations located in the Cosmology album from the Maciet collection of the Library of the Museum of Arts Decorative."

As the only place that humans have seen with their own eyes throughout history, our Moon features heavily in world cultures. The Artemis programme, itself named after the ancient Greek goddess of the Moon, will take humans back to our natural satellite and, in doing so, will become memorialised in popular culture.