Drive me to the Moon

Artist Oliver Jeffers on creating the Our Place In Space sculpture trail

- Oliver Jeffers

Assuming the average speed that people drive is 60km/h, how long would it take to get to the Moon? The answer is about a year, if you took breaks. To get to Mars it would be 400 years, to Saturn 2,500 years; to get to Pluto it would take nearly 10,000 years.

Scale and perspective are things I've been interested in with my work and many of my projects involve the night sky. I like looking at the great unknowns of the sea and the sky, and looking at Earth from a distance. After reading about just how hard it is to portray the size of the Solar System accurately, I wondered if there would be a way to make a scale model. The result, Our Place In Space, is a sculpture trail that ran in Derry-Londonderry and Belfast in April to July, and comes to Cambridge in July and August.