Northwest Africa 13368

NEIL BUCKLAND  

NORTHWEST AFRICA 13368  

signed by the artist  

thin-section print on archival paper  

48 x 36 inches (121.92 × 91.44 cm)  

Executed in 2026.

This print is made to order by Neil Buckland from a thin-section microphotograph of the NWA 13368 Martian nakhlite (see Lot 19). Working from a single thin section — cut and ground to approximately 30 microns, the threshold at which transmitted light reveals the internal crystal structure of the stone in full colour and detail — Buckland uses a custom-built micro-panoramic imaging microscope of his own design to capture hundreds of individual photographs, assembling them into a seamless photomosaic. At this scale, the mineral grains of a Martian rock become luminous geometries: the individual crystals of the nakhlite, the composition of its matrix, and the aqueous alteration products that record the presence of water on Mars, all made visible for the first time. Each print is produced by the artist in archival inks on a 12-color pigment-based fine art printer.

This thin section image captured in fully cross-polarized transmitted light reveals an assemblage of prismatic crystals of olivine and pyroxene within a much finer grained interstitial (or intercumulus) matrix. The pyroxene crystals exhibit twinning, which can be seen as the double segments with different colors.

Buckland's Cosmic Microscapes bridge art and science and have been featured in galleries and museums around the country, international scientific conferences, and published in WIRED magazine, The Meteorite Times, and peer reviewed scientific papers.