HEART OF THE MISSION
By Niamh Shaw (IE)
In January 2017, Niamh participated in a simulated Mars mission as part of Crew 173 at the Mars Desert Research Station, a facility in the high Utah desert where you live as if you are on Mars. With little or no contact with the outside world, the crew began their simulation together, with all five living in a small eight metre diameter habitat, working off a rigorous fourteen-hour daily schedule, wearing spacesuits to venture outside, sleeping in cramped and dark 1m x 3m windowless quarters, and with rationed water, food, and energy.
This installation is an homage to that life at Mars Desert Research Station and Niamh’s reflection of all Mars habitats — the audio, the images, the reports, the daily routines, the safety checks, eating, sleeping, and all the tasks and experiments that have to be completed every day.
BIO
Niamh Shaw is an Irish engineer, scientist, communicator and artist. She is passionate about igniting people’s curiosity by combining creativity with science topics. She presents the human story of science, creating theatre shows, multimedia works and public events with this focus. She has set herself a life’s mission to get to space, as an artist and explorer, walking slowly towards this destiny to bring as many people as she can on the journey. Recently voted one of Ireland’s leading science communicators and STEAM specialists, she is a regular keynote and TEDx speaker, an artist-in-residence at CIT Blackrock Castle Observatory since 2013, and the Humanities Co-Chair at the International Space University's 2018 Space Studies Programme.
Her theatre show To Space toured internationally from 2014 to 2016. Her newest theatre piece Diary of a Martian Beekeeper, is funded under SFI's 2017 Discover programme and created while working closely with ESA’s Astronaut Centre in Cologne, was presented at Space Week 2017, Engineers Week 2018 and will tour internationally in 2019. Her new six-part radio programme Curious Humans funded by BAI, will broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 later this year.
Highlights of Niamh's space mission so far include a visit to the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Star City, Russia. During her time there, she experienced a zero-gravity flight, exploring weightlessness on Earth. She participated in a simulated Mars mission in January 2017 as the artist and journalist for Crew 173. In February 2018, she was advisor and artist at a new analogue Mars facility, DMARS, in the Ramon Crater, Israel. She is currently researching for her next piece of work, which involved a recent trip to Baikonur Cosmodrome to witness her first rocket launch.