Welcome to the Museum of the Moon.
The Kensington + Chelsea Festival is in full swing, having kicked off back on June 21. However, they’re taking things up a notch for the final month of the festival, and chief amongst the events is the return of this gorgeous lunar installation. Created by Luke Jerram, the ‘Museum of the Moon’ is a seven-metre globe detailed with NASA’s imagery of the moon’s surface – and if you happened to catch his model of Earth in Greenwich’s Painted Hall recently, you’ll know that Jerram’s work is truly astounding.
‘Museum of the Moon’ has already visited London once, when it appeared at the Greenwich+Docklands International Festival back in 2017. As a touring exhibition, it has quite the busy calendar – it recently spent a week Down Under for Melbourne’s RISING Festival, for instance – but is currently gracing Kensington + Chelsea Festival for the rest of August. After a short stint in Kensington Town Square, you’ll now find the installation displayed indoors at St John the Baptist Church on Holland Road from August 18-30, altering your perception of the model as it moves from space to space. Find more details here.
Each centimetre of the sculpture represents 5km of the moon’s surface, and short of giant leaps in commercial space travel, it’s likely the closest you’ll get to the Moon’s surface in this lifetime. Elsewhere at the festival in August, a full slate of cultural events are on offer. Comedy nights, cabaret, and a circus show that takes place inside the belly of an inflatable sperm whale all await you here – and that’s only the stuff that starts with a “c”.
Meanwhile, other hype-worthy art in the art includes Baker & Borowski’s colourful ‘Pleasure Garden’, which is found opposite Earl’s Court station, near to summertime playground London Wonderground. Boasting a giant mural inspired by local wildflowers, and structures reminiscent of eighteen-century pleasure gardens, the work calls attention to the intersection between nature and urban spaces. Plus, it looks downright spectacular on the ‘gram.
It’s been a long year and half in which we’ve been mostly starved of inventive, fearlessly creative culture, but Kensington + Chelsea Festival are doing their bit to remedy that with this summer’s offering. Pop over to the royal borough for a season of art, music, theatre, and dance in unusual spaces, and you’ll be enchanted all summer long. See more on their website.
In other news, you’ll be able to catch the Northern Lights in London this August.
Also published on Medium.