How do we negotiate the gulf between the scale of a human life and nature’s vast timeline? 

It’s hard to orientate ourselves in infinite time and space. When existential fear sets in, we retract, grounding ourselves in a more tangible world.

Material things help us cope with difficult questions, but we’re responsible for the effects that our reliance on them is having on the future habitability of our planet. Our encounters with nature are increasingly controlled and manufactured, yet we’re asked to imagine living life on the moon, on Mars, or in outer, distant destinations of the universe.  

The Overview Effect is the term given to the cognitive shift experienced by some astronauts when viewing the Earth from space. They report unexpected emotions, an overwhelming sense of beauty, and an increased feeling of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole.

From February– May 2024, moving image works by artists Tang Han, Ruth Waters and Rachel Rose displayed in the Science Gallery London will explore ideas around our time on Earth, offering a shift in perspective through their depictions of the natural world.

The works - never before exhibited in the UK - will be shown one at a time, for one month each. Alongside each artwork, a series of related events will give you the chance to connect with the artists, learn about their practice, and find out about related research taking place at King’s College London.

Image: Ginkgo and Other Times by Tang Han courtesy of the artist

You can view all three works on the final day of the exhibition 11 May.

Rachel Rose: The Last Day 

The Last Day is a seven-minute video by Rachel Rose comprising thousands medium format photographs shot in her children’s bedroom. Rose composed a series of still lifes from the toys and everyday objects found in a child’s nursery.

The work is structured in seven days, and in each day, she lit the still lifes sequentially from sunrise into night. Each day’s still life—from a bottle of milk to a pile of construction trucks—symbolises a different epoch in the history of the earth. A bottle of milk stands in for the early amorphous, pre-vegetal world, a rubber bathtub toy illustrates ocean life, trucks become ciphers for late industrialisation.

On the last, seventh day, the artist made a radar sensor-enabled carpet which acts central protagonist, emitting light depending on its proximity to humans, ominously signalling the end of times.

The work lays bare that the history of earth’s landscape—from the primordial, to the prehistoric, to the industrialised and into the near future—is embedded in the development of imagination.

2023, 7 minutes

Rachel Rose lives and works in New York. Her work explores how our changing relationship to landscape has shaped storytelling and belief systems. Rose’s films draw from and contribute to the long history of cinematic innovation; whether investigating cryogenics, the American Revolutionary War, or an astronaut’s space walk, Rose directs our attention to sites and histories in which the sublime and the everyday blur. She translates this in her paintings, sculptures and drawings, which materially reverberate with one another, connecting the immediate to deep time. Instagram

Tang Han: Ginkgo and Other Times

Humans live on the same planet as ginkgo — a living fossil that has been around for 200 million years. Ginkgo may be nothing more than a street tree integrated into the city; urban planners often choose it because of its prominent ability to adapt to various climates and resist pollution and pests.

Through the exploration of the ginkgo tree and taking inspiration from ecological ethics in nature writing and ancient Chinese folk tales, Tang Han’s film critically examines shifting human greed, the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans, and contemplates the continuity of life and the temporality of the ginkgo in relation to that of other existences.

2023, 15 minutes

Tang Han lives and works in Berlin. Across the mediums of film, video, installation, painting, her practice questions the validity of things that have been taken for granted in everyday life through subtle approaches of storytelling and perception, investigating the interpretation of images and language representation.

Ruth Waters: Swallow Up

In 2019, artist Ruth Waters travelled to Japan to interview space psychologist Tomio Kinoshita and astronaut Naoko Yamazaki. Their discussions unveiled the disorienting nature of space, where astronauts grapple with a profound sense of lostness and anxiety amidst the cosmic darkness.

Yamazaki discussed how when looking out of the window of the International Space Station towards outer space, she became disoriented with no visual stimuli. Kinoshita, drew a contrast to the tangible objects grounding us on Earth: a simple glance at a chair provides instant recognition and situational awareness, a stark juxtaposition to the disorienting void of space.

In the artist's contemplation, the insights from Kinoshita and Yamazaki not only evoked existential wonder for the cosmos, but also sparked an exploration into the perplexing experience of navigating our everyday lives. Objects, while providing a sense of orientation, possess a malleability that can both reassure and disconcert, urging us to question the narratives and illusions woven into the fabric of our existence.

2021, 9 minutes

Ruth Waters lives and works in London and is a curator, producer, and artist specialising in moving image installations. Her work explores the intersection of contemporary society with existential themes. Drawing inspiration from personal experiences and engaging in diverse conversations, Waters creates works that humorously navigate the complexities of the human experience within broader social and political contexts.

Swallow Up was made with generous support from ARCUS Project