Celebrating Literature within the Once Upon a TIME Art+Science Exhibition
By Ōtepoti He Puna Auaha | Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature | Posted: Tuesday Aug 18, 2026
The idea that ‘time waits for no one’—whether it feels fleeting, slow or accumulative—was at the heart of the 2026 Once Upon a TIME Art+Science Exhibition, held at the Dunedin Community Gallery as part of the New Zealand International Science Festival.
Over five days, the exhibition brought together 29 contributions from artists and scientists exploring the many ways time is sensed, measured and recorded—in emotion and memory, in air, earth and living tissue, in tree rings, carbon dating, light and space-time. Together, the works invited visitors to consider physicist Carlo Rovelli's question: ‘Do we exist in time, or does time exist in us?’
Ōtepoti He Puna Auaha Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature was delighted to promote the exhibition curated by writer, weaver, sculptor and photographer Pam McKinlay, and the wonderful literary events that surrounded it.
Of the works on display, five carried a poetry component, including Rachel Zajac's book-based installation, built from a childhood photograph—a book whose changing pages form a shifting image, making the act of remembering visible page by page.
Words also came alive through a series of workshops, performances and interactive experiences that invited audiences to become creators themselves.
Micros Music and Movement brought stories, sound, visual art and dance together, drawing on work from the Centre for Medical Humanities' Finding the Words creative writing workshops and National Flash Fiction Day's ‘Movement and Time’ micros by emerging writers. The evening featured Michelle Elvy, Claire Lacey, Susan Wardell, Lola Elvy, Sofia Kalogeropoulou, Motoko Kikkawa 吉川基子 and others, in a vibrant celebration of flash fiction, music, movement and visual art.
The Shell Poems workshop invited participants to uncover the stories held within shell middens—ancient deposits of shells, bones and ash that reveal how communities lived, gathered food and interacted with their environment across generations. Inspired by these traces of history, participants wrote haiku-like reflections on memory, place and transformation before painting them onto shells, creating their own contemporary ‘middens’ of meaning.
Visitors could continue this experience at an interactive installation where sand continually shifted to reveal new shells. As the shells emerged, people rearranged them into short nature poems reflecting on time, memory and the natural world. The installation evolved throughout the exhibition, with Pam collecting around 60 of these ephemeral visitor-created poems.
Alongside the show, Dunedin Fringe and New Zealand International Science Festival invited Pam to create a companion installation in the Fringe Window Gallery. Titled TIME once upon us, the work reimagined earlier pieces into a new climate change activation—a window ‘brought to you by the letter E, for Climate Eeeeemergency.’
The exhibition also sparked renewed interest in Pam's own creative practice. Following countless conversations about her work, Flows Like Water (Pamphlaterre Publications, 2024) has now been reformatted as an ebook, making it available to a wider audience through mebooks.co.nz and Amazon.
From artists' books and flash fiction to shell poems, performances and a sold-out publication, Once Upon a TIME demonstrated that literature doesn't simply sit alongside art and science—it helps connect them.
Get a copy The accompanying Once Upon a TIME publication sold out by Thursday during the exhibition, prompting a limited reprint. Copies have also been added to the City Library’s McNab Room, Hocken Collections, and the Auckland Museum and Gallery, which has collected the Art+Science publication series since 2019.
The limited reprint is now available for $25 (including postage). To secure a copy, email Pam McKinlay at pamm@op.ac.nz before the reprint sells out.