We were invited by Trudy Lane to make some interventions for her "Walk through Deep Time" during the Auckland arts festival SPLORE in the Tapapakanga Regional Park. Her installation-walk consisted of a trail of 28 posts where each marked a period in Earth's 4.57 billion history.

These posts were tangible reminders of just how short the history of humanity is: humans do not come into the picture until a matter of centimetres before the end of the uphill walk, while there were metres between the Eoarchean and Paleoarchean Eras - a time during which, for example, oxygen creating beings first appeared.

Her work was more than the walk, because it involved a dialogue between scientists in various fields, giving their insights and perspectives in relation to what changes were happening at the particular periods and what impact this had on the next phases in the developing complexity of life on the planet.

For Splore, the scale was a walk of 208 metres, where each large post marked a passing of one hundred million (100,000,000) years and each smaller post marked a passing of 16 million (16,666,666) years.

Our first work:

Matter before form
Te maru o te kore

was suspended between the trees at about to match the "Deep Time Walk" Cryptic Era, ( over 4 ½ billion years ago). At this time the earth accreted from stardust. Before that … lie innumerable billenia in which matter was dispersed, formed into clumps and swirls, spun and spun out, to again form clumps.

This work references the shapes of constellations in formation, and the apron worn for modesty over the organs of conception and birth. Cretaceous Period