COSMIC TIME is a durational performance by visual artist Michaela Gleave, composer Amanda Cole, percussionist Louise Devenish, and artist and costume designer Katie B Plummer. The project premiered as part of the TarraWarra Biennial 2021: Slow Moving Waters, curated by Nina Miall. The work considers time on a cosmological scale, inviting audiences on a guided journey into the depths of existence.
Decentralising the hierarchy of knowledge away from western science and logic, the project explores alternate forms of understanding, including cosmological, geological, biological, historical, and cultural. Developed during a residency at the Powerhouse Museum in 2020, and COSMIC TIME is informed by historic scientific and musical concepts such as orbital resonance and harmonic sequencing, and involves alternate, opposing, and intersecting rhythmic and metric schemas, skirting the peripheries of art, science, music, and esotericism.
Four percussionists, each appearing as a spirit from the multi-verse, sound a sequence of explorations of time and space. Resonant, pitched metallic instruments, sparkling clusters of bells and triangles, low drums, woods and tam-tam are used in combination with electronics to evoke atmospheres, sensations and rhythms scaling from the fall-out of the big bang; the endless circling of planetary forms; the fluttering heartbeats of desert mice; and the dissolve of consciousness into the astral plane.
Structured as a scaling journey through time and space, COSMIC TIME is comprised of eight interwoven movements:
Big Bang
Cosmic Soup
Galactic
Stellar
Planetary
Biological
Chemical
Esoteric.
CREATIVE TEAM
Lead artist: Michaela Gleave
Composer: Amanda Cole
Musical director: Louise Devenish
Performers: The Sound Collectors Lab
Louise Devenish
Nat Grant
Kaylie Melville
Hamish Upton
Costume design: Katy B. Plummer
Costume assistant: Nicole Barakat
Creative coding: Warren Armstrong
Astronomical coding: Michael Fitzgerald
Lighting design: Nick Moloney
Sound engineer: Hannah Reaney
Video by: Angus Kemp
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
TarraWarra Museum of Art acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the original custodians of the lands and waters on which the Museum stands.
This project was commissioned by the TarraWarra Museum of Art as part of the TarraWarra Biennial 2021: Slow Moving Waters, curated by Nina Miall.
This project is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.
The creation of this work was supported by a residency at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.
Dr Louise Devenish is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE200100555) funded by the Australian Government.
With thanks to Monash University.