The lusciousness of time — Dawn Ng's 'The Earth is an hourglass'

Thu 30 Apr 2026

How do you slow time down? How do you speed it up? That lusciousness of time that we don't often get in the everyday experiences in the world we live in. In a very tactile way, The Earth is an hourglass 2024 mirrors what's going on around us — every mountain, canyon, and valley that has been formed has been eroded by water, that continual movement tells the story about time and change.

Singaporean artist Dawn Ng’s The Earth is an hourglass is a time-lapse video of the melting of a pigment-infused block of ice, its colour palette informed by looking at satellite photos of Earth. Through this work, using its subtle graduations of colour, Ng explores the passage of time, as the ice thaws and melts, suggesting a sense of a shared place and of time running out.

The block of ice weighs up to 70 kilograms and over the course of a month it undergoes a freezing process of up to 44 layers of different coloured dyes and watercolour pigments dominated by oceanic azure and telluric rust, shocked with rivulets of scarlet, magenta and yellow. When finished, the block is allowed to melt, capturing the entire 20-hour process of decomposition into a mesmerising 40 minutes.

Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA)
Brisbane, Australia