Skyscape was a commission by Nottingham Trent University in partnership with Creswell Crags Museum and Prehistoric Gorge – a limestone gorge on the border of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, and Britain’s most northerly Ice Age site. The project formed part of a wider interdisciplinary research initiative led by Dr Daniel Brown and Dr Katharina Massing at NTU, exploring skyscape as intangible heritage through augmented reality, audience engagement, and creative practice.

Brehony was commissioned as the project’s artist, making three short films that were exhibited as an audiovisual installation at Creswell Crags Museum, and which formed the creative foundation for a developing AR app designed to bring the heritage of the night sky to daytime visitors. Working across deep time and the present – from Neanderthal communities sheltering in the gorge’s caves 40,000 years ago to the light-polluted skies above post-industrial neighbourhoods today – the films explored skyscape as a site of shared cultural memory, wonder, and political condition.

Developed across four thematic territories – Curiosity and Wonder; Mystic and Scientific; Time and Nature; Deep Past and Your Past – the work wove together poetic written text, location sound, and moving image into three films, each an encounter with the site and with the enduring human impulse to look upward.

From the films:

“We all know what it is to carry history. Our bodies act as personal archives of lived experience. Of things we have seen, standing on different landscapes, observing shapes of sky.”

“No one sees sky in the same way. No one experiences time the same, yet we use the same words to describe it.”

“Dilemmas of our time – that we should be made to feel poor for challenging electricity’s affordability, rather than rich with clear vision of night sky.”