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.
Joseph reaches down and picks up a shell. He hands it to the boy, who is dragging a red plastic bucket across the sand. “Here. What about this one?”
Bill assesses the offering intently. “No Daddy,” he says firmly, “It’s broken here, see.”
This conversation between Sarah Gillett and the writer Amy Lay-Pettifer digs deeper into the artist’s relationship with Paolo Uccello’s painting The Hunt in the Forest (1470) and her wider art practice.
They all saw her. Standing on the boardwalk outside the old woman’s house, smoking.
The old woman was dying of cancer. Not from cigarettes, but still. They did not approve.
In the house, the old woman frantically peeled potatoes, scraps of skin flying everywhere, sticking to the sink, windows and her woollen clothing like a plague of starchy warts.
