In her presentation "Return to Stardust" Merchant once again responds to the contemporary moment. With the world around us constantly, and rapidly evolving, the artist looks to a more primordial time, where she begins to search for answers in the stars. She proposes to create paths to a new world, similar to what you would see in an observatory. These works, from her "Birth of a New World" series focus on the sky, using a holistic vision of the universe to try and answer what comes after the Holocene and Anthropocene when the earth started changing in a much more rapid and real way. As she examines what we will be left with, Merchant also questions ideas of achieving Utopia for the universe as we explore space.