I am really pleased to share the film made by John Hooper and myself during our BigCi Environmental Art Award Residency 2022. You can watch the film here.

Last verse is a dual screen film made using footage and sound recorded in and around BigCi and up to Blackheath in the Blue Mountains of Australia. The film depicts two temporalities. Firstly from the perspective of a non-human animal and secondly, a cosmic time frame.

Are we cosmically insignificant, or cosmically significant?

As we zoom out further, we might think that nothing we do matters, eventually Earth will be absorbed into the sun, and no trace of our world will exist. But what about the fact that there is no other world just like ours, no other world with kangaroos, skinks or gang-gang cockatoos. It has taken our world 13.7 billion years of the universe existing, beginning with an extraordinary start, billions of years of star formation, the gathering dust, the cooling of our rocky world and the formation of our oceans and atmosphere to develop into our home. All of these processes have helped the eucalyptus trees to grow into homes for insects, animals and birds, have helped the pergolas to form, have helped our brains to develop in such a way that we can look out at the pinpricks of light in the sky and through research, understand that they are unfathomably old and unfathomably large spheres of gas.

It took a vast period of time for our universe to form into the one we see around us. After Earth is gone, time will exist for an immeasurable period, with life unlikely anywhere in the cosmos.