Back to the beginning...initial brief

...'In the western tradition, comets have long been identified as harbingers of change. In his 1906 novel In the Days of the Comet (set a century ago in 1910, the date of Halley's last but one apparition) the British socialist and science fiction writer HG Wells imagines the appearance of a comet over the United Kingdom which released a green gas that creates a 'Great Change ' in all man kind, turning away from war and exploitation and towards rationalism and a heightened appreciation of beauty. Notably , this shift in understanding is achieved not through human agency, but through an ineffable alien force.

While current scientific theory posits that comets are nothing more than elliptically orbiting clumps of dust,ice and gas, utterly indifferent to our affairs, they remain powerful reminders of the way in which our species has attempted to understand experience through the measuring of time (Becky Beasley, Tris Vonna-Micchel and Maaike Schoorel). the writing of history (Karla Black, Luke Fowleer and The Otolith Group), the inference of cosmological influence (as we see in the work of Spartacus Chetwynd, Roger Hiorns, Gail Pickering, David Noonan), the identification of patterns of conduct and form (Karin Ruggaber, Simon Martin, Edgar Schnitz and Phoebe Unwin), and the notion of a derministic universe (as we see in the work of Brian Griffiths, Sarah Lucas and Keith Wilson)...