Wales in Space
The suit is made of the fabric woven in the last remaining wool mills in Wales. The astronaut boots are traditional Welsh clogs crafted by a traditional clog maker. The whole pressure system that will enable the astronaut to sustain life in outer space was built by a Welsh plumber.
Hefin asked Melin Tregwynt to participate and we gave him some St David’s Cross in Indigo and White which he’s used for the spacesuit.
The work is not solely about making a series of space garments, it’s also about catapulting these people into entirely new ambitions and dreams and discussing with them the possibility of sending local crafts and skills into space. “The project facilitates participatory speculation, in which the people are invited into the construction of cosmic objects, and their experience during this process allows them to speculate about the different possibilities of their skill.”