mandybrigwell

The heart of an atom laid bare; an act of creation filling an expanding universe; an exaltation of planetary masses orbiting a central point. It's a matter of perspective and scale.

We released the seeds at midday, following our best computer predictions, hoping against all odds that they'd travel far, re-seeding the earth, sowing a future for us. It was months since the fall, since that terrible moment containment failed; quarantine failed; humanity itself failed. We called it ‘The Last Days’—unoriginal, perhaps, but descriptive all the same–and shook our heads in despair at our hubris, at the price we'd paid. This would make it all right. Our computer model, proving we still had hope, that we'd make it all go away. The seeds would float on the wind, drifting into the tortured air, and carry with them new life. And we would live again.

Always open to interpretation, art provides a potential mirror to reality. Is The Last Days of Fire and Steel set in an industrial past, a society on the brink of moving towards mass production? It could be… and yet these are the last days: is this an industrial complex on the edge of civilisation, a warning from the past? Perhaps, then, this dark place exists in the not-so-far future, where the waters are polluted with a rainbow snakeskin of chemicals, and the light of distant nuclear impacts illuminates the sky. Seeking craft whirl through eddies of smoke, and ugly black gantries claw at the sky. Perhaps, again, this piece is none of these: merely a fantasy of a time after an event, some apocalyptic occurence of tremendous magnitude, has left the earth scorched and black. Or maybe it's more positive: a trip along a clifftop at night, enjoying fresh air, and the glitter of the moon on the sea: the pleasures of yakamoz, of διακαμός.