This project originated in the GIS community in New York City. While studying spatial analysis and visualization at Pratt I attended a GEONYC lecture  about Voronoi geometry and the awesome potential, as Stuart Lynn puts it, of NASA’s open-source database. 3D tessellation governed by the concept of a boundary, I recognized Voronoi's potential for sculpture immediately. I’m not a data scientist but have made sculptures with geometry before.  Sphere (1994) models the main event in Flatland, a novella about mathematics and consciousness (Abbott: 1884). Using open source data from NASA this project creates a collection of polygons that nest. Voronoi analysis of the dataset casts a three dimensional net through a set of one hundred points, or coordinates. Latitude and longitude do not apply in outer space; the astronomical terms are ascension [ for x] and declination [for y].  100 Closest Stars are scaled down in size, and up in number. The complete series was printed in three dimensions, to the maximum build volume (between the sizes of a grapefruit to a volleyball), with Voodoo Manufacturing in Bushwick, at the suggestion of Stuart Lynn and Jeff Ferzoco Carto for Bushwick Open Studios. Each sculpture in the series is singular and unique, with specific qualities coming forward.

Two years later the Director of Imagination and Culture texted me about sculpture in 2018, and asked if I had anything suitable for The Perimeter Institute in Waterloo Canada. ’ ‘Yes’, I said, and drove the entire collection of 100 Closest Stars over the border from Buffalo into Ontario. The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo Canada is a research institute in an architecturally significant building, with anodized aluminum cladding throughout, with an interior triple-height social space known as the atrium. We decided to install the stars there, on the feature wall, above a painting by Elizabeth Mackintosh. We devised hardware assembly to join the sculpture to the wall without penetrating the cladding. Hardware for the assembly involves a 1” rare earth magnet from Lee Valley Tools, a butterfly toggle and washers from Spanneur. In 2020 the complete series of 100 Closest Stars was acquired as an artist proof (neither signed nor numbered) to ensure the installation remains on view permanently, for the public good.

In 2021 The Blue Building Gallery asked to present my work in a commercial context in Halifax. Two exhibitions ensured, Soft Launch and What If. To avoid unnecessary shipping costs I asked Eureka Technologies Inc. if they could reproduce 100 Closest Stars, from the original files, in Nova Scotia. EurekaTec is a multifaceted workshop led by a craftsman and master printer. They make their own filament. The series uses thirty-four primary, secondary, tertiary colors in translucent, pastel and opaque grades. That the color is ‘in’ the material is essential for these sculptures. The forms can take up to 26 hours to print. Don’t ask me how but they feel organic, as if digitally grown, because the tool path is visible on the surface. Additive processes leave a trace over time. Anomalies present themselves, ridges form in seashells.

The scientific name and number is engraved on the back of each star for cataloging purposes. The collection can be searched numerically. The title of the series, date and place with my name are engraved around a magnetic mount. Individual stars are available upon request, in an edition of ten. It takes about two weeks. EurekaTec reproduced all 100 objects from digital files for What If (Halifax,11.19. 2021 - 01.20.2022). The complete series was acquired, as 1st in an edition of 3, by The Royal Bank of Canada from that show for their offices internationally. While preparing the files for EurekaTec I found three anomalies. 'We can’t print that’, they said. I scaled them up in my studio instead, in steel. Outliers, made for an exhibition and subsequently installed in a garden, have precisely measured edges, cut lengths of cold rolled steel, bound together at the corners with wire until I find the geometry I’m looking for. Open volumes hang from the rafters of my studio in Fremont Center, loose and flexible until the form presents itself, and I weld it. Six foot tall sculptures  Ray Cronin described  online in a review posted to Sculpture Magazine as  bubbles, ‘articulated solely by their edges’.Siting sculpture amidst the plantings is his idea.  These sculptures highlight existential spatiality to the fore, through geometry, as the approach, orientation, and seasons change. Here the world vibrates through each geometric form.  Holt’s garden is influenced by the work of Dan Pearson, James Golden and Piet Ouldorf, in which the constructed landscape is a three dimensional painting. A gardeners' research and decision-making echo the compositional efforts of a painter. These sculptures put a finer point on it and function as a kind of frame. In a naturalistic perennial garden the work can meet people where they are, and take them somewhere else. 

This work is an  ecosystem, with its own logic, culture and methodology.  In making this work I  don’t touch the actual objects. I don’t touch stars in the night sky either; I think about them; sculpture is planning. Before I  make plans to visit Nova Scotia I  contact EurekaTec to see if it is possible to make three or five stars that I might pick up on the way out of town. As a result, when Ray Cronin asked if he could  include this work in ‘Working On it: New Canadian Sculpture’ I was able to offer the gallery a grid of 25 sculptures from this series, with a freestanding sculpture of the sun. The orange, powder-coated steel, roughly a six cubic foot volume was transported whole by yours truly,  in the open bed of the f150, and installed  opposite its thermoplastic version in the sight lines to  Salvador Dali’s Ecstasy of St. James.  Sixteen wall mounted sculptures  were acquired for the permanent collection. Sol is once again in Fremont Center. Moondog Atelier presented a selection of stars amidst a display of frames during her guest appearance at Lovitt NYC in August 2024.. Having coined the term Visiting StarCraft, Peter Holt presents three sears to visitors who attend Open Days of Open Sesame Garden in the spring and summer of  2024. Individual works  from the series are available from an edition of 10, upon request through The Star Store.