Tom Liggett (b. 2004) is a London-based artist whose practice operates at the physical limits of art and science. Working with inaccessible environments such as space and the deep sea, his work seeks to make the invisible visible through experimental and expansive photographic processes, revealing abstract forms of phenomena that would otherwise remain unseen. Pushing photography beyond the camera, and even beyond light itself, Liggett explores how radiation, oxidation, and other invisible forces can generate images.

His project HELIOS pushes this concept to its absolute limit, exposing photographic film at the edge of Earth's atmosphere to some of the most extreme radiation. At an altitude of over 121,000 feet, the film is subjected to a continuous bombardment of cosmic radiation, including muons, some found from black holes millions of light-years away, as well as intense ultraviolet radiation. These invisible forces physically inscribe themselves onto the film's surface, producing images generated not by light, but by space itself.

The original negatives have since been used to produce these prints. Rather than being reproduced with ink, each image is hand-printed in the darkroom by projecting light through the original space-exposed negative onto light-sensitive photographic paper in complete darkness. Only six HELIOS I and six HELIOS II prints exist, with each taking tens of minutes to produce by hand, making every print a direct photographic artefact of the original film exposed at the edge of Earth's atmosphere.