Art for Artemis – Inés

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 Inés Bueno Pascual from the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain.

"For the figures of the people, I was directly inspired by Equipo Artemis, using their photographs as the starting point for the silhouettes.

On the other hand, for the astronauts’ suits, I was inspired by the Orion spacesuit, the suit equipped for Artemis missions. In this case I didn’t want the people inside to be visible, to leave room for the imagination. The astronaut suit is already a suit that does not distinguish between men and women, so anyone could be inside it.

The phrase is inspired by the famous quote: “It’s a small step for one man, but a giant leap for mankind”. A phrase uttered by Neil Armstrong as he set foot on the surface of the moon on 20 July 1969. This phrase came from my great friend and physicist Hamza Akoudad Ekajouan.

In my works in general, I tend to be directly inspired by sensations and emotions."

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.

All the artworks are available on ESA's Orion blog with interviews with the artists.