The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) has brought art and science together in an exhibition celebrating ancient humanity’s appreciation of the night sky.

In a first for the SKA Organisation, indigenous and local artists from South Africa and Australia have collaborated in the ‘Shared Sky’ exhibition, which was launched in Perth, Western Australia, on Tuesday.

The exhibition connects artists in remote communities from either side of the Indian Ocean. Through meeting and exhibiting their art, they are establishing a connection to ancient cultural wisdom for the two sites where the SKA will be located.

Three artists from a small community art centre in Nieu-Bethesda, in the Eastern Cape, have travelled with an engineering delegation from SKA South Africa for the exhibition launch.

Nieu-Bethesda community arts director Jeni Couzyn artists Sandra Sweers and Gerald Mei, whose /Xam-speaking San ancestors lived where the SKA South Africa telescopes are being built, have created quilts that capture elements of /Xam mythology around the origins and movements of celestial bodies, such as the sun, the moon and the Milky Way.

They will meet fellow Australian artists from the Yamaji Centre, in Western Australia, and other Aboriginal artists, who were still living a largely traditional way of life, hunting and gathering until the mid-nineteenth century, on the Australia SKA site.

SKA South Africa director Dr Bernie Fanaroff notes that science and art have a lot in common.

“They are both about beauty and aesthetics – most science is beautiful, and so is most art. The quilts are really beautiful in themselves – colourful and dynamic. Science is like that too.”

The exhibition is being run in parallel with the SKA Engineering meeting, which has brought together teams from around the world who are working on the design of the first phase of the world’s largest radio telescope, to be built from 2018 in South Africa and Australia.

The South African artists have worked together at the First People Centre of the Bethesda Arts Centre in Nieu-Bethesda to make quilts that explore their own creation myths and reflect the ancient culture of their ancestors that survived in the harsh central Karoo desert for millennia.

The centre says the large art quilts reflect a visual language that stretches back to a time of great antiquity. Fragments of ostrich eggs between 65 000 and 75 000 years old have been found in the Karoo region.

For the Yamaji people in Australia, the appearance of the dark shape of an emu stretched out along the length of the Milky Way has heralded the season for collecting emu eggs for thousands of years.

For the SKA Organisation, the exhibition encapsulates the spirit of the SKA telescope.

“The SKA will greatly enhance humanity’s knowledge of the universe across us, and may help answer some of the ancient questions that have been posed by people since they first looked up into the night sky.”

The exhibition will move from Australia to South Africa early next year.