Investigating the life of things across space and time
Story show; 20 mins
Written and performed by Sarah Gillett
12.47pm Tuesday 30 November 1954
Oak Grove, Sylacauga, Alabama
Mrs Ann Hodges is pretending to be asleep on her living room sofa. In outer space a small asteroid is moving. It passes so close to the Earth that it becomes trapped by the planet’s gravitational field, travelling at a tremendous speed, 30,000 miles an hour. Down, down, down it falls…
There are three types of meteorite: stony, iron and stony-iron. Every meteorite fall is named, so each meteorite fragment can be identified from its unique physical and chemical properties. Measuring the levels of iron, nickel, feldspar, olivine, silicone and carbon reveals the meteorite’s life story, from their parent bodies, place of birth and age to the collisions and interruptions they have experienced on their journey. But the study of meteorites is also the way we derive the age of our solar system. They are the most ancient accessible material we have to study, hundreds of millions of years older than the oldest rocks on Earth.
In 2018 I entered the world of online dating. Quickly I began to see a pattern emerging across my matches; primarily, there were a lot of men stroking big cats. At first the photographs were merely absurd but the more I looked into this phenomenon the darker the implications of these photoshoots became. This series of drawings depicts some of my matches alongside data pulled together from a number of different dating platforms.
A collage audio piece recorded live on my phone at a gathering in a flat in Hackney. I handed out sections of a landscape poem that I had written to the group of women who had assembled and we sat on the floor in a circle.
Inspired by the lives of women at Rockingham Castle and their resonance in history, literature and spirituality, this web-based artwork takes the form of a sleeping ghostly female figure and explores an interior world where memory, dreams and shadows reign.
