In her significant new body of video installations and prints entitled Pillars of Dawn, Richardson imagines a desert landscape in which environmental conditions have crystallized the terrain. Sculpting every branch of each tree and populating the entire landscape with millions of individualised crystals has been a painstaking labour of love. Roughly speaking, there is one crystal in each of the landscapes for every species still alive today. We live in a time when many scientists believe humans are causing the mass extinction of thousands upon thousands of other species; Richardson’s work asks us what it is in the world that has value for humans. In each of the scenarios we encounter, we see a beautiful, empty, crystallised world. It is almost as though all life-forms had been transformed into pure carbon – that is, into the most concentrated forms of pure carbon in the natural world – diamonds. The majesty and infinite wealth of the Earth is revealed, although no humans appear present to appreciate it.