The other side of Forever

    Drawing on engineering and cosmological principles and developed over a six-year period, this art-apparatus is part submarine, part refrigerator, part boiler, part electricity and total distillery. …Forever shows us absolute spirit in sculptural form.

    An apparatus made with an artisan’s touch and of a practical order, …Forever effects the flow of liquid matter, agitated, condensed, vaporised and cooled under the conditions of regulated heat patterns. The network of pipes connecting metal, glass and plastic columns creates a distilled image that too, operates precisely at the brink of eruption.

    Certified by the British Customs and Excise to produce spirit through a strict process of recovery. ..Forever puts into play various activities of recovery, retrieval and repossession operationally. Its spirit content is literal and precarious, re-circulated and contaminated by those elements of the work that are of an adulterated nature.

    Set in motion by the artistic wish to solve practically the problems of volatility, explosion or extinction intimately connected to molecular energy, the customised use and transformation of recovered parts is a practical endeavour. At the turn of a key the sculpture is simultaneously static, grounded, vertically appealing and fluid, flighty and evanescent. The dynamics of speed and of collision integral to the work associate the circulation of alcohol with the circulatory processes of a wanting reflexive body.

    More expansively referential in its play with models than Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube and with echoes of Takis’ science-like investigations of materials, …Forever has landed and it is almost perilous.