Notes from a Cretaceous World

Nicholas Mangan’s collage features a rare postage stamp showing Earth from outer space. The stamp was made in 1999 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the first manned moon landing. It bears a postmark from the tiny Pacific island of Nauru.

The work is perhaps a subtle reminder of Nauru’s almost lunar landscape of craters and pinnacles – formations damaged through exploitation of the island’s resources, as Mangan exposes in other works. Nauru appears in name only, the tiny island otherwise invisible in the vast ocean.