About us

Cecilia Ömalm (b. 1974 in Umeå) lives and works in Stockholm. She studied at the International Center of Photography in New York, USA, in the late 1990s. After a long career, her artistic practice can be seen to oscillate between sculpture and photography, with works that relate both to the spatiality of the present and to the history of the past. Over the past ten years, she has developed works in cyanotype, a photographic  process invented by the astronomer John Herschel in 1842.

Göran Östlin (b. 1968 in Stockholm) lives and works in Stockholm. He is Professor of Astronomy at Stockholm University and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In his research, he uses observations—including images—to investigate the processes that shape galaxies and how they change over time. Östlin has also been part of the international team that built an infrared camera for the James Webb Space Telescope.

Since 2019, Ömalm and Östlin have been working on an artistic–scientific project titled Ad Lucem / To the Light. Using cyanotype as their medium, the duo explore and reinterpret both historical and contemporary cosmic imagery. The prints are made using glass negatives placed directly onto hand-coated paper and exposed to sunlight. The method becomes a philosophical act, as images originally created by light from the heavens are reborn through light from the same source.