VESSEL: PERFECT LOVERS 2009, Wooden vessel, 110cm x 25 x 8.5cm. Polished Meranti Wood, hollow stainless steel orbs, razorblades, text.

Collection of the artist

VESSEL On the morning of Monday 29th June 2009, my wife, Mika Thom and I each wrote a list of 50 words detailing how we felt about being apart – in daily life and, in terms of our larger mortal journey together.

The words were then engraved onto stainless steel razorblades and, after being read aloud, placed inside two stainless steel orbs. The orbs were immediately welded shut, sealing them in perpetuity whilst erasing the notion of individual ownership that accompany the authoring of the lists: it is no longer possible to determine whose words are contained in each vessel.

As with Schrödinger’s paradoxical cat sealed inside a box, it is possible that the words now oscillate between both orbs, existing as it were in a state of indeterminacy – collapsing the individual words and thoughts into a new ‘entangled’ co-existence. Paradoxically, this state is simultaneously ethereal
and concrete; static and in flux.
The artwork is perfectly balanced and, if touched, each orb moves freely atop the ‘tracks’ created by the two wooden side sections, with the entire vessel rocking gently from side to side. Thus, the words make a soft noise, ‘speaking’ or ‘whispering’ (in an entirely new audiological / linguistic form) when the orbs crash into one another as they periodically seperate and meet again.