carbon steel, stainless steel, and the atmospheric weathering oxidation of time
7’9” x 4’x4” x 3’6”
2010.
An arc within the suspense of another arc, within a continual perpetuation of time and alignment of light to shadow to body; Winter Solstice Waiting marks time and marks our attempt to gauge time. Demarcating the ephemeral passage of sunlight from East to West by physicality and shadow, or from the dark of winter to the light of summer, or possibly the passage of life to death, to life again, Winter Solstice marks a spiritual space of reflection toward time past and the light of new, unseen.
The surface of carbon steel sheet left to the exterior elements of rain, light, wind, sun, or snow becomes an index of physical time by passing through these atmospheric forces. Steel’s rusting oxidation, in the fluid atmosphere of existence, is time. It is the record of environmental time in relation to elemental iron. From December 21st to June 21, 2009 (between two solstices; day of most dark to day of most light) Winter Solstice Waiting stood quietly in the exterior environment, collecting the time of each day. Time was collected via light in tandem with shadow, along with each drop of rain running down its structure evaporating into a path of time recorded in rust. The sculpture’s steel surface painted by weather continues to record or be an index of the year’s time passing.
In time, nothing is still. Ruin and entropy are fundamental properties of things constructed. In winter and in silence, time is amplified. Things left behind, the debris of human activity, are artifacts telling stories of ourselves.
We perceive stainless steel as stainless because of what it is not. Stainless is in a state of suspense or waiting. Before light’s presence can be felt, light’s absence must be reckoned with, and absence is the first genius of new ideas. Most of contemporary “developed” society is pacified by a state of waiting. Waiting for enough money, waiting to buy, waiting to sell, waiting for the bus, or waiting for Godot. The past and the future are comfortable illusions of our consciousness. The present is always less than we imagine it could be, and this awareness shapes human experience. Winter Solstice Waiting stands as a space to ponder the present in a cosmic whorl of memory and expectation.
