I was recently invited to create a 24-panel “history of the universe” to go up the spiral staircase of an old church that has been transformed into an art gallery & community hub.

The brief was to start with the “Big Bang” & end in the present day, with an emphasis on how long it has taken to get to where we are now &, having got here, how quickly we humans are destroying the world around us.

I decided not to use AI for any of the writing & instead, buried myself in a ton of reading & research to get to what you see here. In some instances, the limited space on each page meant re-writing & editing to the point where important information is glossed over & some detail is lost. Unfortunately this was a necessity borne out of the fact that no one could reasonably be expected to spend more than a few minutes on a spiral staircase &, with one panel per step & 24 steps, even at one minute per panel, you’d be there for nearly half an hour!

The project is not quite complete. The location of two panels near the end - the ones about human impact on the environmant - is currently under discussion & this will affect their size & shape.

Each panel will also have a QR code linking the reader to a YouTube movie or web page that will flesh out the detail shown on the panel.