Brown senior Logan Tullai led a team of volunteers on Pembroke Field to create sprawling silk prints of lunar craters using cyanotype. All photos by Nick Dentamaro/Brown University.

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Date September 24, 2024
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Photos: With cyanotype, Brown student uses the sun to visualize the moon

Inspired by Chinese handscrolls and NASA film of the moon’s surface, senior Logan Tullai used an 1800s technique to lead a community art project on campus on 60-foot-long swaths of silk.

Students and volunteers set up the skeleton of a shade structure
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Students and volunteers set up the skeleton of a shade structure to prevent the film from being developed prematurely under the sun's UV rays.

volunteers unroll film onto silk
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First, they carefully unfurled long swaths of blue silk under the shade structure.

volunteers secure the film to the silk
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Then, volunteers unrolled the film scrolls on top of the silk, placed plexiglass over the film and secured it all in place using clips.

group lifts and moves shade structure
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After preparing the film and pre-treated silk for exposure, the group lifted and moved the shade structure. The unwavering sun accelerated the chemical process, and the prints developed over the course of 10 minutes.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The sun was shining without a cloud in the sky, but the moon was the real star. 

Brown senior Logan Tullai and a cadre of volunteers came together on Brown’s Pembroke Field on a recent warm day to create sprawling silk prints of lunar craters using cyanotype — a photographic process invented in the 1800s that creates blue prints using ultraviolet rays. 

Volunteers unroll silk onto a board in preparation for the cyanotype process
From kids to faculty members, more than 30 volunteers turned out to Pembroke Field to help Brown senior Logan Tullai create multiple cyanotype silk prints. 

“Something about making prints of the moon with the UV rays from the sun seemed so interesting,” said Tullai, who received a student grant from the Brown Arts Institute to support the project. “With cyanotype, everything is blue, so there’s also this fun ‘blue moon’ element to it.” 

Under a home-built shade structure, Tullai and a crew of roughly 30 students and volunteers unfurled a roll of the film — roughly 10 inches by 60 feet long — to lie flat on top of a long stretch of blue silk coated with a special formula of iron compounds. With factory-line precision and speed, they covered the film with plexiglass, securing it every few inches with a clip so the film wouldn’t slip or budge during the exposure process. 

On Tullai’s count, everyone stood up, lifted the shade structure in unison, and set it under the sun’s blazing UV rays to develop for about 10 minutes while the volunteers took respite under the shade of nearby ash trees. 

After a timer went off and the clips were removed, Tullai and a handful of helpers thoroughly rinsed the silk until the blue-green water ran clear; then it was back to the assembly line as they hung the silk — now boasting crisp white and teal images of the moon — on a clothesline to dry. 

volunteers hold up silk to keep it off muddy grass
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As some volunteers worked to rinse the silk, others held up the ready-to-dry portions to keep it clear of the damp grass.

group hangs wet silk up to dry on a clothesline between ash trees
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The group worked in tandem to hang the silk — now boasting crisp white and teal images of the moon — on a clothesline to dry.

cyanotype silk print featuring images of lunar craters hangs on clothesline
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The cyanotype prints feature images of moon craters from a NASA lunar mission in the late 1960s.

For the project, Tullai used film that features images of moon craters from a NASA lunar mission in the late 1960s. For years, the film was part of the Brown/NASA Northeast Planetary Data Center, a repository of NASA materials and resources housed in Brown’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. 

Tullai first learned of the film's existence last fall, when Brown’s Multimedia Labs led a Moon Design Challenge and invited the community to incorporate the film into their own art projects. Inspired by a black-and-white photography course he was taking at the time, Tullai used a single piece of the film to develop a gelatin silver print. 

He then became interested in ways of processing an entire roll, something not necessarily achievable in a cozy campus darkroom. The dimensions of the film negatives also reminded Tullai of the ancient handscroll formats he studied in a History of Chinese Landscape Painting course he took last fall. 

Something about making prints of the moon with the UV rays from the sun seemed so interesting. With cyanotype, everything is blue, so there’s also this fun ‘blue moon’ element to it.

Logan Tullai Class of 2025
 
Logan Tullai helps volunteers hang the silk up to dry

He decided he would need to enlist members of the campus community to pull it all together into a cohesive, large-scale project. 

“The silk is a nod to those amazing handscrolls,” said Tullai, who is concentrating in political science and economics. “And I settled on cyanotype because it’s something I could do outside, and I could really get the community involved.” 

To help execute his vision, Tullai recruited help by submitting an announcement through Today@Brown. That’s how Janie Levin, a Brown Ph.D. candidate researching planetary geoscience, found out about the project. She showed up to Pembroke Field to offer a helping hand — and plenty of knowledge about the moon. 

“The moon is definitely one of those science ‘gateway drugs,’” Levin said. “People love space, but the moon is very accessible in terms of explaining science, so this a great way to get public engagement. Also, it is just very cool.” 

Tullai hopes that the public’s enduring fascination with the moon will drive attendance to a future exhibition — currently in-development through his partnership with the Brown Arts Institute — that will highlight the cyanotype silk prints and celebrate their rich history from infinity to beyond, and back to Brown. 

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Brown Arts Institute Open Curriculum The College

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