2023 to 2026, Leeds, UK
Moon Palace
A work by Heather Peak and Ivan Morison
Converted school bus, timber, reclaimed seating, printed silk, porcelain, optical telescope, radio telescope, sound, library and kitchen
11 × 2.5 × 4 m
An East Leeds Project and LEEDS 2023 co-production, commissioned by Foxglove and LEEDS 2023 for Smeaton300. Based on an original idea for a mobile observatory by East Leeds Project and developed in collaboration with the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leeds
Moon Palace is a travelling observatory and social sculpture housed within a converted school bus. It is at once a vehicle, an astronomical instrument, a domestic interior and a place for people to gather.
The work was inspired by the life and legacy of Leeds-born civil engineer and astronomer John Smeaton. Alongside his work on lighthouses, bridges, canals and water systems, Smeaton constructed an observatory at his home in Austhorpe and recorded his observations of the night sky. His ability to move between science, engineering, poetry and public life offered Heather Peak and Ivan Morison a model for a work that refuses conventional divisions between disciplines.
Moon Palace brings together art and science, observation and imagination, specialist knowledge and everyday conversation. Rather than asking audiences to enter a gallery or scientific institution, the observatory travels directly to communities. Since its launch in 2023, it has visited schools, neighbourhoods, public squares, universities, festivals and museums in Leeds and across the UK.
The exterior of the bus is covered by a hand-airbrushed cosmic landscape created by artist Kiaran Davies. Inside, the original institutional character of the school bus has been transformed into a warm, tactile and otherworldly environment. Grand fir felled and milled from the artists’ woodland in west Wales lines the interior alongside reclaimed bus upholstery, printed silks, porcelain lunar lamps, a library of detective and speculative fiction, a kitchen, a writing desk and places to sit, talk, read or sleep.
The interior draws upon the American house-truck movement, community art buses, owner-operated lorries, survival vehicles and the theatrical imagery of Georges Méliès’ 1902 film A Trip to the Moon. These references combine in a form that seems to have arrived from a parallel history, carrying the technological optimism and collective experimentation of an earlier future into the present.
The work was inspired by the life and legacy of Leeds-born civil engineer and astronomer John Smeaton. Alongside his work on lighthouses, bridges, canals and water systems, Smeaton constructed an observatory at his home in Austhorpe and recorded his observations of the night sky. His ability to move between science, engineering, poetry and public life offered Heather Peak and Ivan Morison a model for a work that refuses conventional divisions between disciplines.
Moon Palace brings together art and science, observation and imagination, specialist knowledge and everyday conversation. Rather than asking audiences to enter a gallery or scientific institution, the observatory travels directly to communities. Since its launch in 2023, it has visited schools, neighbourhoods, public squares, universities, festivals and museums in Leeds and across the UK.
The exterior of the bus is covered by a hand-airbrushed cosmic landscape created by artist Kiaran Davies. Inside, the original institutional character of the school bus has been transformed into a warm, tactile and otherworldly environment. Grand fir felled and milled from the artists’ woodland in west Wales lines the interior alongside reclaimed bus upholstery, printed silks, porcelain lunar lamps, a library of detective and speculative fiction, a kitchen, a writing desk and places to sit, talk, read or sleep.
The interior draws upon the American house-truck movement, community art buses, owner-operated lorries, survival vehicles and the theatrical imagery of Georges Méliès’ 1902 film A Trip to the Moon. These references combine in a form that seems to have arrived from a parallel history, carrying the technological optimism and collective experimentation of an earlier future into the present.
A large optical telescope extends into a dome in the roof, allowing visitors to observe the night sky. A second, radio telescope gathers signals from celestial bodies, translating them into visual and sonic forms. During its first tour, sonic artist Alex De Little, working with Eric Stammers, developed sferics, a sound work that used Moon Palace as a place from which to listen to natural radio-frequency emissions generated by lightning in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Artists, astronomers and scientists host visitors aboard the bus. Observations of the Moon, Sun and stars sit alongside conversations about engineering, climate, community and the ways we understand the world around us. Cosmic Tea is prepared and shared. Scientific observation becomes a social act, and the work of looking outwards into space becomes inseparable from looking at one another and at our place on Earth.
The work’s mobility is central to its social form. As Claire Irving, co-director of East Leeds Project, explains:
“The beautiful thing about Moon Palace is we drive her to the people. So you come from Earth, into Moon Palace.”
The bus creates a temporary civic interior wherever it stops. It offers both spectacle and shelter, but its purpose is not simply to communicate astronomical knowledge. It creates the conditions for curiosity: a space in which people can slow down, observe, ask questions and remain for a while without being required to produce a particular response.
Writing in The Guardian, Mark Brown described Moon Palace as “a collision of creativity, art and science”. Within that collision, the work proposes an expanded form of public sculpture, one that can travel, host, teach, listen and change through use.
Supported by LEEDS 2023, Leeds City Council, The National Lottery Heritage Fund, Arts Council England, Bruntwood, Burberry and the ScottishPower Foundation.
Exterior artwork by Kiaran Davies.
Technical conversion by BDC UK.
Artists, astronomers and scientists host visitors aboard the bus. Observations of the Moon, Sun and stars sit alongside conversations about engineering, climate, community and the ways we understand the world around us. Cosmic Tea is prepared and shared. Scientific observation becomes a social act, and the work of looking outwards into space becomes inseparable from looking at one another and at our place on Earth.
The work’s mobility is central to its social form. As Claire Irving, co-director of East Leeds Project, explains:
“The beautiful thing about Moon Palace is we drive her to the people. So you come from Earth, into Moon Palace.”
The bus creates a temporary civic interior wherever it stops. It offers both spectacle and shelter, but its purpose is not simply to communicate astronomical knowledge. It creates the conditions for curiosity: a space in which people can slow down, observe, ask questions and remain for a while without being required to produce a particular response.
Writing in The Guardian, Mark Brown described Moon Palace as “a collision of creativity, art and science”. Within that collision, the work proposes an expanded form of public sculpture, one that can travel, host, teach, listen and change through use.
Supported by LEEDS 2023, Leeds City Council, The National Lottery Heritage Fund, Arts Council England, Bruntwood, Burberry and the ScottishPower Foundation.
Exterior artwork by Kiaran Davies.
Technical conversion by BDC UK.
Photographers’ credits
Installation images_Charles Emerson
Installation images_Charles Emerson