The burden of eternal recurrence

How do we value life, and how do we consider its worth? The burden of eternal recurrence uses a chain form to reflect on the contradiction between the broad, abstract, collective nature of life’s continuum, and the links that represent the individuals within it. Chains repeat while links slip and slide and do their own thing. 

The work is full of productive contradictions. A chain is both restrictor and connector – it tethers, but the nature of a chain is to carry forward. Chain can be heavy when stationary, but when moving, especially from a pile to a stretch, can appear liquid. I am drawing attention to the endless and inevitable progression of life, and at the same time saying: stop the clock and notice each intimate moment.

I engage these contradictions in the form I make, and what I can do with it. Velvet speaks of quality and worth – it yields to pressure, echoing the softness and vulnerability of a body. This velvet, the familiar brown of living rooms of my lifetime, is recycled and full of its own embodied history, perhaps comfort or warmth. Its stuffing, by contrast, is everyday rubble – hard and lumpy, unimportant, able to be tipped out and re-used. 

The arrangement of this piece is variable, saying and doing different things in different spaces. There is a tension between what this piece is, how it operates, and what you can do with it. This variability alludes to a dream-like state, a space of potential, or other logics that can coexist and contradict.

While the work is indicating something above and beyond itself, something metaphysical, it pulls in the opposite direction to draw attention to the now, highlighting simply ‘doing and being’.