Art that uses dust to help us make sense of ourselves in deep time
Photo by Kunj Parekh on Unsplash
Seeing ourselves and our very brief flash of a life span in the context of deep time is one of those mysteries that truly stretch our ability to make sense of the experience of being a human. What to make of our brief blink of a life in the context of a universe that is more than 13 billion years old? How do we make sense of our hopes and fears as we live on a planet that has been formed more than 4.5 billion years ago? Just think of all that came before your appeared - and all that will come after you? How does the reminder of deep time shift our perspectice on our own life? Does the realiation of our insignificcance on the time scale moves us to exitential despair, or to awe about the fact that we can even contemplate this?
Art is one of the ways we humans try to make sense of things that are hard to comprehend, things that stretch our understanding of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. And I have just come across an amazing art project that uses dust to help us make some sense of ourselves and our brief lives in the context of deep geologic time. It is a project called Requiem by Scottish artist Katie Paterson. She uses glass containers of dust from many diffferent times in our earth’s history in a poignant, interactive work that gives form to the grief many of us feel as we contemplate the ways we humans have, even in our short life span, impacted our planet. It is a work that is both a celebration and a lament - and in its complexity helps us make sense of what is in many ways unfathomable.
To learn more about this art, and to challenge yourself to contemplate your life in the context of deep time, check out these links:
