In 2016 on the roads of Beveridge outside metropolitan Melbourne I dragged a meteorite fragment behind my truck. My partner drove will I filmed from the tray.

Although night and in an isolated area, during this activity the police unexpectedly arrived, likely called by concerned locals who wondered at the strange activity. Fortunately, we were stopped on the shoulder at the time checking camera equipment and they failed to see the meteorite tethered to the tow bar at the rear of the vehicle.

This action and the work it produced are of a number made in response to a historical narrative I first encountered in 2014, while researching for a then upcoming work. The story concerned an exchange in 1894 between Robert E. Perry and a local inhabitant of what is now called Greenland. The account described how Perry, an American explorer, had traded a rifle for knowledge of the location of a large fragmented iron meteorite (or meteorites) that had fallen upon the ice shelf some time ago.

The story of the meteorites is much older. They had fallen, a likely estimate, 10,000 years earlier and had for generations been used by the local inhabitants as a source of iron to make cutting edges and tools, long before the arrival of terrestrial iron, long before the iron age. The meteorites became coveted objects, and too a site of cultural significance. They were given names: The Tent, The Woman, The Man and The Dog, and over generations the rocks were progressively shaped by beating flakes of iron from their surface with basalt that had to be carried onto the iceshelf for this purpose.

After discovering the location of the meteorites Perry, with his crew, packed them into their ship and sailed them back to New York. They remain on display in the American Museum of Natural History today. I was intrigued by the story of these rocks—their stop-and-start celestial past: first flying through space, then still for a while; their darker terrestrial history—set in motion again through human encounter, first by hand, piece by piece, then upon a boat. In 2015 I began to make works in response.