Deep Time
Art that reaches for geological and cosmic timescales far beyond the span of human history.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
Deep time is the span of geological and cosmic history, billions of years against which human history is a flicker. The writer John McPhee popularised the phrase in Basin and Range (1981), but the idea goes back to the 18th-century Scottish geologist James Hutton. Henry De la Beche's watercolour Duria Antiquior (1830) imagined the ancient Dorset sea crowded with ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, drawing on fossils found by Mary Anning.
Modern artists work with scale and slowness. Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970) coils basalt into the Great Salt Lake, Vija Celmins has drawn starfields and ocean surfaces in patient graphite since the late 1960s, and Hiroshi Sugimoto's Seascapes, begun in 1980, show horizons that could belong to any age. Liu Kuo-sung answered the first photographs of Earth from space with Which Is Earth? (1969), and Katie Paterson's Future Library gathers manuscripts to be printed only in 2114.
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Engagement with Mass Media
Equestrian
Erotic
Eye Contact
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Face
Failure
