Layers of Time and Waves of Events

This is my last day here. I have been collating all the research I have done. Lining up all my collected objects, and collecting stories from the various people here who have agreed to do a portrait.

Of the research, my hunch is that the work should be about revealing what is hidden. This includes the rock and cave systems that underlie the Cradle, which have been slowly giving up their secrets in the fossil layers of plants, algae, sea creatures, and the fossilised remains of animals and early hominids going back 2 million years. Within this time line have been several catastrophic events including 3 magnetic pole reverses, which will led to the deaths of the hominids seeking water under the ground.

Going back further to the Impact event 2 billion years ago, a time when plants were just beginning to create oxygen from CO2. This event will have altered the rock beds in the cradle creating caves which slope gently into the rock. This destruction may well have upset things enough to kick start more life forces, which you could say was a creative event. The Earth has seen cycles of destruction and creation. From melted rock created during the asteroid impact, you get a line of rock boulders which 10,000 years ago San people use as a rain making site to encourage the cycle of life of which they were a part.

Just as behind each person I have met here, is a hidden story, so the Earth itself reveals glimpses of its hidden layers of history going back to the formation of the Earths' crust 4 billion years ago:
layers of time and waves of events.

My intention is to try to encapsulate some of this in a small rock chamber, set under some trees and within a circle of revealed bedrock. The interior of the chamber will plot the movement of the sun over a year and will have drawings in iron oxide on the walls - alluding to plants, fossils, shattered rock, time and waves as in sound waves, shock waves, waves of events.

Over the coming months I will be planning these drawings as works on paper and as prints as well as using geological and topographic maps. I will also begin work on transforming the portrait images into the stories given me by the various individuals. Then it is hoped I will return to make the chamber and show the works on paper in a space in Johannesburg, perhaps during the art fair here next September.