Lia Halloran: Warped Side

Artist Lia Halloran spent 13 years creating over 500 paintings for the book The Warped Side of Our Universe: An Odyssey through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves, co-authored with Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Kip Thorne. This exhibition presents select pieces from the series, illuminating themes such as time travel, black holes, gravitational waves, and the universe’s origins.

The paintings reflect the unique collaboration and friendship between Halloran and Thorne, merging science, art, and poetry to explore black holes, wormholes, and other cosmic phenomena. Halloran’s
figurative portrayal of her wife, Felicia, as a heroic space traveler, adds an intimate and empathetic layer to the narrative, making complex astrophysical concepts accessible.

Halloran’s work spans various techniques and mediums linked to scientific research, from photography to cyanotypes to drafting paper. In these pieces, she uses ink on drafting film to create a spectrum of indigos, cyans, and blues, capturing the sublime and abstract essence of the cosmos. The paintings, influenced by gravity, portray opacities ranging from the densities of black holes to the pulsations of galaxies and the dimensions of the human form. This project offers a profound and personal experience of our universe’s mysteries and marvels.

Lia Halloran, an award-winning artist who has exhibited widely in galleries and museums, is an associate professor and chair of the art department at Chapman University, Orange, California, and is represented by the gallery Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

Kip Thorne, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, NAS member, and the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at Caltech, is the author of the best-selling books Black Holes and Time Warps and The Science of Interstellar.

Image courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.