Institution
National College of Art and Design (NCAD)
Medium
Painting
Graduation Year
Class of 2025
Share
"On the Meaning of Life, Time, the Universe, & the Washing"…a doorway reveals the void, a chilly container of nothing-ness. The whole apparatus is set into the posterior orifice beneath a rectangular casing with plugs attached to the end of it terminating in a series of stranded white wires that disappear somewhere off to the left behind a lateral appendage clearly marked Yaw Servo. The supposed factuality yields no information. Nothing is known but the impenetrable surfaces. In my latest body of work, “Cycle, Spin, End.” I reframe the mundane ritual of doing laundry as a profound, cosmic act. Blending existential philosophy, domestic labour, and visual poetry, this project transforms the familiar into the metaphysical. My practice draws inspiration from thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, embracing the absurdity of life’s repetition while searching for meaning in the everyday. The work invites audiences to see routine domestic chores not as futile, but as sacred gestures—acts that mirror the universe’s endless cycles of birth, decay, and renewal. This recent installation of expanded paintings and drawings are evocative of clocks, pendulums, star maps, and motion-capture diagrams. The works—circular, monochromatic, and rich in texture—map the gestures of loading a washing machine, transforming them into meditations on time, transience, and mortality. Referencing the writings of Robert Smithson, I use oil and chalk to explore the tension between ephemerality and permanence, impermanence and entropy. The result is at once both humorous and reverent: a visual language where domestic labour becomes ritual, and the everyday becomes eternal. Resisting the notion that we exist in a purposeless, chaotic universe, that through awareness, repetition, and by attention to the smallest of acts, we might reclaim agency over time and find meaning—even in the wash. *From THE DOMAIN OF THE GREAT BEAR. By Mel Bochner & Robert Smithson
