Understand Your Inner Resourcefulness

Understand Your Inner Resourcefulness

Insight

Artist and astronaut-to-be Sarah Jane Pell demonstrates what’s possible when we combine the artist and the explorer. She talks about the relevance of having a larger goal, like going to space, to bring a smaller goal, like climbing Everest, into perspective.

Uniquely engaged in art and science research intersecting the performing arts, human movement, and underwater diving, Dr Sarah Jane Pell’s work parallels human spaceflight and exploration. She performs expressively – mostly underwater – and builds a novel prototype apparatus to test and communicate extreme performance. Artefacts include sculptural, technical, poetic and media events. These build an arc of imagination to contribute new insights to further technology transfer and the human experience of discovery.

A Freedman Foundation Travelling Art Scholar, Pell was the first artist to graduate from the International Space University and NASA Ames Singularity University. She led the NASA-sponsored Luna Gaia project, has flown artworks in space, participated and led EVA Simulation (spacewalk training underwater) workshops with astronauts, and designed interactive aquatic-robotic systems. She also contributes to futurist think tanks, interaction design, film and cinematic world building and early start-ups.

Dr Pell currently serves as Co-Chair of the European Space Agency (ESA) Topical Team Arts & Science [ETTAS]: developing an ESA Arts Initiative, and Senior Space Art Consultant to Icarus Interstellar: an organisation dedicated to interstellar flight by 2100.

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