This series of works is the latest development of an ongoing narrative in which Merchant draws on her imagination and the ancient knowledge of nature to consider how humanity might leave behind traditional ways of existing to evolve across different spaces, times, and dimensions. Her creatures, in their various guises, can be seen as proxies for us, caught in various stages of becoming. In Cosmic Crucible, for example, the recurring figure with the head of a vulture – a representation of humanity in its current state – is pictured passing through a portal that seems to separate the polluted past and a more fertile future.