GYRE

“Time is the substance from which I am made”  Jorge Luis Borges

This series of paintings offsets depictions of the human body against the spiral marks generated by the harmonic motion of two connected pendulums. An arm from each moving pendulum meets and drives an empty ballpoint pen to scratch into wet black oil paint and produce a clean white linear spiral or gyre. The system converts potential energy to kinetic energy, discharging ultimately as thermal energy. In this way each gyre can be seen as a record of this energy conversion across a discrete passage of time.

The world is studded with spirals, from fingerprints to sunflower florets, from galaxy structures to the Celtic clockwise spiral denoting the shrinking winter sun. Gyres were also the philosophical foundation of WB Yeats’ world view. Yeats believed that gyres captured the contrary motions inherent within the historical process and also perhaps the psychological phases of an individual’s development. His poem ‘The Second Coming’ with its stunning imagery and mysterious themes was the aesthetic inspiration behind the paintings informing the pose, poise, gesture, perspective and lighting of the figures. 

The pendulum has long been a talisman of time. From its invention in 1656 by Christiaan Huygens, until the 1930s, the pendulum clock was the world's most precise timekeeper. It was such clocks that made possible, for better or worse, a civilisation attentive to the passage of time, hence productivity and performance. Today’s atomic clocks dissolve the elusive infinitesimal of ‘now’ into a scattering flock of nanoseconds. 

The body too brims with clocks. Circadian, menstrual and cellular chronometers are the pacemakers of human life. While living we are anti-entropy mechanisms resisting the unspooling of our energies. Our journey through our lifespan is the story of the transformation of the role of Time from generous benefactor in youth to rampant kleptomaniac in old age. Every triumph over life’s low lying ambuscade of pathologies, no matter how ringing the victory is only a reprieve from the inevitable end. We are all involved in a tragic enterprise, biologically vulnerable and essentially entropic.