Cavendish Arts Science

Louise Beer + John Hooper

+Last Verse

BigCi Residency
Environmental Art Award 2020 (delayed)
Residency completed in July 2022

10m28s

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 pagodas 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. One day, Earth will no longer exist. Time will go on for an immeasurable period, before time itself will cease to exist. Does each rotation of our blue marble around our star draw the universe increasingly closer to existing without life as we understand it?

+Harmonic Islands

This piece was developed for a Pale Blue Dot Collective exhibition at The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora in Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand in January 2022. Louise spent several weeks in residence on behalf of the collective in September 2020. During the residency, Louise travelled around the Ōtautahi/ Christchurch area and spent time field recording and photographing the forests and landscapes. The artists worked across oceans to develop this work whilst separated by pandemic restrictions.

Through sound, we journey back to ancient Aotearoa, to imagine the forests before they were ever seen by human eyes. As we move from the water to the forest, pushing through dense vegetation, we encounter mysterious sounds eluding to species that are no longer part of our landscape. Through a deep-time perspective, we invite you into a new way of seeing the familiar species that we share our world with and explore the cosmic importance of our habitats.