Jim Frazer

"A Planet Found upon the Path"

Year Created: 2022

Dimensions: 16" h x 8.5" w x 2" d

Materials: digital prints, bookcloth, board, rocks, and acrylic paint

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On a Walk
I found a planet on the path,

It had rings, and everything.

I stopped and bent down,

To be sure, yes, there it was,

And there as well, its own moon.

Not every day you see a planet

So close up, even a small one,

They tend to stay out there

In space among the stars,

Where they orbit and precess.

So down on earth, it needs a home.

Which it finds here.

 
The plates revealed when the doors in each page are opened are from the Harmonia Macrocosmica, a celestial atlas published in Amsterdam in 1661. It was the seventh volume of a project that proposed to map the entire earth and cosmos. The original plates were hand-colored engravings. They are beautifully baroque representations of the different cosmological systems of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and others. The planet I found is not illustrated; it is so small.

 
The accordion book in a compartment on the last page is The SPHERE of Marcus Manilius made an English Poem - a 1675 translation by English poet Edward Sherburne of the first book of a five volume didactic poem Astronomica, written in the first century CE. It describes the various planets and constellations, as an introduction to an extensive discussion of astrology in the later volumes. 

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Available for purchase from the artist: jim@jimfrazer.com

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