BLACK- BROWED ALABATROSS

Most of the time we see the world in relation to the time of our own life span. Darwin had glimpses of whole other time spans – eons of time. If we were able to speed up 600,000 years (about how long Antarctica has been covered in ice) into 60 seconds a whole new and revealing pattern would emerge. If we could speed up 10,000 years into 10 seconds we would be able to see change happening like a river flowing.
In effect science is about looking for patterns which reveal a process.

This turns out to be very apt as on the Falklands there are things called Stone Runs which are rivers of boulders which flow down the hillsides in wave patterns. Apparently the latest theory is that during the last ice age when the ground was under permafrost, the continuous thawing and freezing of the ground, broke up the rocks into small pieces and over time the big rocks were pushed to the surface in the same way that big nuts come to the surface of a muesli bag. Then over time the big rocks begin to flow millimetre by millimetre down the hill over the rolling shattered small rocks and the flow of these rocks is like rivers or wave patterns on a beach, but created over a few thousand years.

So I wonder here about time. The time scale of events. I had thought to make some kind of an intervention into these stone runs, but the fact of their time is crucial to their pattern and beauty. The permafrost has gone now and the runs are for now static, so I think they are best left as they are, a temporary pause in these rivers of stone.

In art pattern is seen as an aesthetic thing, but this need not be so. A scientist may describe a pattern in terms of maths or equations, or a graph; all forms of language which can be further pinned down by the language of names and labels.
An artist may reveal a pattern in a totally visual way so that you experience pattern as a primary emotion which connects you to other patterns and processes. If you are not tempted to turn that back into language, then something wholly new is made visible. If science and art may run side by side, without trying to do the same thing, then I think a deeper experience of the world is brought into being. Perhaps an image of a stone run made over the last 18,000 years could be linked to an image of moving ice made over 60,000 years, or maybe, just a season.