As a species, we are living through successive revolutions, initially through the internet, and now the rise of AI, simultaneously, with the James Webb Telescope the physics of the cosmos has to be completely reevaluated. We now know that the Big Bang was not the first, and that seven hundred and seventeen galaxies are now newly observable. Bolster’s wonder at these successive life altering sets of circumstances gives full rein to his singular speculative fictitious versions of geographical depictions of exoplanets. Each work encompasses numerous processes both analogue such as painting, embroidery, and debroidery; and digital through different image augmentation and digital drawing processes.

Unlike all of Bolster’s body of work in the last eight years, for 200 Billion Suns the artist hasn’t actively engaged with scientists, and consequently, it is the most visually poetic. It is quotational of research Bolster is conducting on a range of issues affecting our existence: climate change as our largest challenge, systems for making us a sustainable species, and our culpability in animal, plant and insect extinctions. The works are the beginning of a series the artist refers to as Intergalactic Romanticism, and each take cues from the works of Casper David Friedrich, and the philosophical writings underpinning German Romanticism. His works detach from a present, and imagine several future possibilities, aimed at one outcome, wonder.


200 Billion Suns

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