Skyscape was commissioned 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. Working across film, sound, and participatory practice, the project explored skyscape as intangible heritage: the sky not as backdrop but as living site of cultural memory, shared experience, and political condition.

The work moved between deep time and the present – from Neanderthal communities sheltering in caves 40,000 years ago, to the animal carvings discovered in Church Hole Cave in 2003, to the light-polluted skies above neighbourhoods of social inequity today. Developed in close collaboration with researchers Dr Katharina Massing and Dr Daniel Brown, the project unfolded across four thematic territories: Curiosity and Wonder; Mystic and Scientific; Time and Nature; Deep Past and Your Past.

The resulting three-part film work was exhibited at Creswell Crags Museum and online, each film a poetic and investigative encounter with the site. The writing woven through the films approached skyscape as a universal language – one spoken across species, across millennia, across vastly different ways of inhabiting the earth.

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.”