The work contains over a hundred hand-gathered stones, which have been individually painted to confuse the mineral, the animal and the human.
These flints are suspended on a structure that can be understood as an abstraction of the British Empire. Encountering it can give a visual for thinking aloud about Empire.
The film is framed by the narration of some of the first forms of life in England.
It traces their epic journey from life in the sea to being mined for weaponry, creating the first industrial lung disease, creating property out of land and then being used to fire guns across the British Empire to remove people in many other countries from their breath and land.
Bringing all these actors together creates a kind of quantum Identity.
The artist picked up the flint because she identified with its black core that was galactic, otherworldly and in a different time frame but also part of the contemporary landscape around her.
Barrett started to paint the flint brown like herself and her family members. The work grew as her artistic research deepened over three years.
At the diaspora pavilion, she works with groups facilitating workshops to enable space to think about ancestors who have passed in unmarked ways in unmarked places through flint. We paint flint and reflect in a supported way. The work grows with multiple authors and contains multiple histories and interpretations.