“We are bathing in mystery and confusion,” Carl Sagan told his best interviewer. “That will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.”

We have wielded our tools of reason at the mystery — theorems and telescopes, postulates and particle colliders — but the best tool we have invented for cutting through our confusion remains an instrument of love and not of reason: We make art.

Long before we understood how stars made souls and what happens when we return our borrowed stardust to the universe, our ancestors sought an organizing principle for the mystery, drawing celestial maps and creating elaborate cosmogonies with no knowledge of gravity and orbits, of galaxies and exoplanets. Our arts anticipated our equations and counterbalance them — science has only deepened our confusion with discoveries intimating that this entire universe might exist inside a black hole, that it might not be the only universe, that the thingness of everything in it may just be a hologram. It would, of course, be thrilling to confirm any of these theories. But for all the thrill of truth, it is at the intersection of mystery and meaning that we become most fully human and find the things that make us most alive: wonder, beauty, love.

This may be why I find myself so enraptured by the work of Tasmanian-born Australian artist Shane Drinkwater, which I came upon in Elements: Chaos, Order and the Five Elemental Forces (public library) — Stephen Ellcock’s rigorously researched and passionately constellated cosmos of wonder.

Partway between ancient Tibetan astrological thangka, Maria Clara Eimmart’s 17th-century astronomical paintings, and Ella Harding Baker’s 19th-century solar system quilt, bearing echoes of Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint, Drinkwater’s paintings and collages are coded cosmogonies of color, form, and feeling — orbits and planets, comets and meteor showers, dashed and dotted and arrowed, simple yet mysterious, elemental yet deeply human.

Emanating from them is the same transcendent bewilderment that prompted pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell to sigh in her diary:

We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.

Couple with Native artist Magaret Nazon’s stunning celestial beadwork, then revisit Thomas Wright’s self-published and scrumptiously illustrated 1750 marvel An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe.