Hard Times

Rigid boxes, designed for e-commerce and next-day delivery have been sealed and wrapped with sellotape then extracted to leave translucent wobbly cubes tentatively trying to maintain their shape, often sagging, even collapsing under their own weight. It offers the suggestion that this could be a fragile inter-dependency between powerful multinational corporations with their compliant and consumerist market and utilised workforce. This precarious balance, often unacknowledged, is all that holds today’s markets together.

Constructed during Lockdown I daily wrapped my Amazon boxes to represent my confinement. Only when restrictions were lifted could I document the work in open public areas. It was not until the following year that the work could be seen within a white space.

These flimsy husks fold and slump yet retain their form, holding everything together around a void and embodied in the layers of adhesive are the trapped traces of my hand, hermetically sealed at the moment of construction, like a tomb. Yet this material, seemly inconsequential, manmade erodes like stone or pottery, breaking into ever smaller particles over time, to alter the ecological balance and direction of evolution, with an outcome still not known.