I'm Elise Hu. You're listening to TED Talks Daily.

Time feels pretty elastic, especially as we continue to live through this pandemic.

Questions about time, specifically deep time, are the focus of artist Katie Patterson's work.

In her talk recorded for TED Women in 2021, she explains how

she's tried to better connect humankind to the progression of nature, the earth, and the cosmos.

Have you ever bathed under a light that creates the glow of a full moon, sculpted beaches into miniature mountains,

or breathed in the aroma of earth-first trees.

These are some of the artworks that I've made to come to an understanding of deep time.

But what is deep time and why does it matter to us at all?

The term describes the history of the earth over a time span of

millions of years. My first encounter with deep time came after I'd finished my studies, had no job and didn't know what to do.

So I took off to work as a chambermaid in the remote north of Iceland. I was tilted on my axis and began a series of explorations

to try to figure out how to tell the story of deep time.

This has been the quest of my work and has taken me through the cosmos,

the geological strata of the earth, to encounters with the earliest forms of life.

In Iceland, I realised that we live on a planet.

By opening my eyes to the primordial landscape,

I started to understand, we're not born out of nothing.

The sea, the sky, the earth, the air. We're made of the same stuff we coexist.

In just my lifetime, we humans have become a geological force. We've caused glaciers our in the world to melt entirely.

I wanted to bring these distant landscapes closer to our lives in a visceral way.

So of course I set up a phone line. People everywhere could dial a number and listen live to the sound of a glacier melting.

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