Every second is like, forever, and every year is like 11.3 centimetres (2007)
When placed against a wall, fly screen flickers with moirés and patterns that shift from one perspective to the next. The illusions are remarkable but the reality of the fabric is less interesting – a simple fibreglass weave generating a regular grid of rectangles.
Into this trickery I’ve stitched fragments of soundwaves. Each fragment is taken from an anti-war speech given at a rally in Adelaide in September last year and the text of each fragment is noted in the title of the piece. The title of every piece also notes that each fragment has been accredited to a different, hypothetical anti-war speech from throughout history – the speaker, the war, and the place, date and time of the speech are all noted.
So I sit at my stitching frame, head bent far down, chin to chest, stitching, stitching, stitching, and considering. What do people do in times of war when they barely appear as such – like these days here? What to do when, despite the daily media coverage whose news is as regularly repetitive as the grid on the fly screen, I feel so removed. And unwilling. So I sit and stitch and this action becomes an action of inaction, like all my other daily actions. And they become actions of waiting where every second takes forever and every year is absurd.