Three Perspectives is a collaborative audiovisual work made with composer Simon Knighton and climate scientist Dr Freya Mitchison, premiered as part of Changing Music in a Changing Climate at the Royal Northern College of Music in October 2020.

The work presents sea ice through three scales of vision – microscopic, human, and satellite – weaving together extreme close-up footage of melting ice filmed by Brehony, Antarctic footage from a scientific research cruise, and NASA archival satellite imagery of the Arctic. Set against Knighton’s composition – itself structured around the ratios of Milankovitch cycles, the rhythmic heartbeat of Earth’s climate – the film translates complex climate science into an audiovisual meditation on rhythm, disruption, and planetary vulnerability.

Brehony’s contribution centred on the visual language of the piece: the microscopic filming of ice, the editing that moves between scales, and the process of working with NASA materials to bring satellite perspectives into dialogue with the intimate and the human. The result is a work that asks what it means to hold geological time and immediate experience in the same frame — a question that runs through much of her wider practice.

Watch Three Perspectives on YouTube.

Read more about the project here.