Brightest of All Time depicts GRB 221009A, an extraordinarily bright 10-minute gamma-ray burst that occurred approximately 1.9 billion years ago, 2.4 billion light-years from Earth, and only became visible to us in 2022. Painted with traditional Koori pigment on hessian, the work is made using ground charcoal, an almost pure form of carbon that is essential to all life on Earth.

Combining traditional knowledge with contemporary astronomical imagery, the work reflects on a brief blip in deep time – long before plants and animals, including humans; long before everything we have created and everything we have destroyed.
—Matthew Harris