Preparing for orbit: Space Tangle docks at UCL East this October

Last year, the UCL Public Art and Cultural and Community Engagement teams announced artist and UCL Slade School alumni, Dr Sarah Fortais, had been commissioned to make a major public artwork as part of the 2025 World Space Week here at UCL East. It is now less than a month until Sarah’s exhibition, Space Tangle, takes over the Marshgate campus in what promises to be an exhibition that will spark our collective imaginations.  

Space Tangle brings together three distinct works by Dr Fortais: Cosmic Debris, Cosmic Flock, and Lunga 6. Each explores the often-hidden entanglements between people, place, animals, and materials that shape how we imagine and make future worlds. Using outer space, the ultimate landscape of possibility, imagination, and future-thinking, Fortais asks us to consider what is overlooked: our relationship to waste, to the discarded, the backgrounded, the unnoticed. What about the animals? What of the materials that gain new value under different conditions? 

Since 1999, the United Nations General Assembly has recognised October 4-10th of each year as World Space Week; an international celebration focussing on how science and technology can better humanity. UCL’s newly commissioned artwork Cosmic Debris and exhibition Space Tangle will form one of over 16,000 events taking place across 83 nations for World Space Week. The 2025 theme for World Space Week is Living in Space. 

Cosmic Debris 

Cosmic Debris presents 280 cast hands suspended into a meteoric installation, temporarily frozen in orbit. Seven different community groups, including 80 staff and students currently at UCL, have contributed their hands and in the process learnt how to lifecast with alginate. The artwork aims to cause a chain-reaction (or Kessler effect) of knowledge sharing, inspiring future researchers to learn more about how we can responsibly manage space debris. Cosmic Debris will also become the setting for the site-specific vocal work Fragments, composed and performed by Filament Theatre. This sound artwork, comprising of recorded and looped vocal parts, will periodically fill the installation further exploring the artworks' theme of contemplating our human connection to space debris. 

Cosmic Flock  

In Cosmic Flock, Fortais collects debris from east London and repurposes it into spacesuits for sheep. In doing so, she invites us to see waste differently, not as useless, but as a vital substance. In space, where resources are scarce, such transformations are not just practical but essential. What is waste on Earth may be life-sustaining elsewhere. These animals bring the long, often forgotten history of nonhuman astronauts into immediate interaction with urban change as the sheep are repeatedly set out to ‘graze’ throughout the Olympic Park. Sheep become figures through which to consider how value, usefulness, and connection shift across subjective contexts. 

Sarah will be performing the grazing of the sheep on three separate occasions, shepherding them across the Olympic Park on October 7th, 8th and 9th, between 11am and 1pm on each day.  

Lunga 6 

Lunga 6 presents works created during Fortais’ time as the artist-in-residence on the UK’s first analogue space research mission. This was a trip taken to an uninhabited Scottish Island, Lunga, where scientists aimed to replicate what it would be like to make a Mission to Mars. Sarah was asked to join the mission as its artist in resident, where she made unique pieces in response to her time there. These pieces, spanning from cast body parts depicting medical scenes, to animal spacesuits, to mixed media collaborations with the mission astronauts, offer poetic glimpses into remote and off-world care. 

More about Sarah’s work

Fortais’ work is bricolage, and involves collecting, taking things apart, jamming them together, and rebuilding. Using a language of construction which emphasises provisionality and obvious connections between individual parts is important to Fortais. The creative and transformative power that outer space holds for Fortais rests in how it changes the way we perceive our materials on Earth. Through speculative assemblage and material re-framing, Space Tangle brings into focus the overlooked networks and forgotten agents that shape our collective planetary and extraterrestrial futures. 

Space Tangle will be open from October 3 to November 2 at UCL East Marshgate. For more details, see the event page.