attendant is designed as an ongoing time-based installation, the first element of which (above) was created over a period of six months, aiming to depict a physical representation of the weight, landscape and scale of waiting. I wanted to use the notion of patience as a creative mechanism to document the spaces we inhabit in between thought and action. The repetitive nature illustrates a constant conscious struggle to return to a balanced, meditative state.
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Somewhere between reading Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ and Nietzsche’s concept of ‘The Eternal Return’ I discovered waiting.
The concept of eternal recurrence, and the pressure it can put on each individual’s choices, no matter how great or small fascinates me.
"The heaviest weight. - What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you : 'This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine. ' If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, 'Do you want this again and innumerable times again?' would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for no thing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?"
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science.
'En Attendant Godot' (Waiting for Godot) perfectly describes the feeling of being stuck, feeling powerless to change a situation or incapable of making a decision about how to alter a dissatisfying position for fear of choosing the wrong direction.
“Je suis comme ça. Ou j'oublie tout de suite ou je n'oublie jamais."
“Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.”
ESTRAGON: I can't go on like this.
VLADIMIR: That's what you think.”
- Samuel Beckett, Waiting For Godot.
The video below is a small example of the process used to create what has become a work approximately 2metres 60cm wide by 1 metre 50cm tall.