WICK

I wanted to make something that engaged with ideas of motion, stillness and scale. At first glance, the piece is static. But what you cannot see with the naked eye is that there is quite a lot of motion happening — water being pulled, molecule by molecule, up and through the wick. It's simply happening at a scale that we can't easily see or engage with.

The glass speaks to these ideas of motion, stillness and scale as a material. Glass is a strange kind of a solid — a liquid frozen in place, its molecules slowed down enough to make it seem rigid. But glass is not actually a solid at all. It is its own state of matter — one that physicists call a "nonequilibrium." At short time scales, it appears solid. But over longer periods of time it continually moves towards a liquid state. This is why very old glass windows are thicker on the bottom than the top — the glass is very, very slowly becoming liquid again.

On top of that, glass is used in optical devices to allow us to see things at scales we cannot otherwise access. We use glass in microscopes to watch tiny creatures whose whole lives span just a few hours. We use glass in telescopes to look out into the universe, and watch stars implode over the course of millennia.

The cotton fiber in the wick, and the paper, speak to another kind of time scale. Cotton is a plant, and plants work on time scales we do not always respect — we cut plants down faster than they can regrow. But also cotton's role in chattel slavery is another reminder of time scales that humans could do a better job of grappling with. Slavery was not actually that long ago, and its roots persist within our systems and our culture to this day whether we like it or not.

In a way, Wick is a time piece. Each image created is a portrait of a day — many hours of seeming stillness suddenly made visible on the page. The water travels through the wick at a set rate (about .1 inch per minute) and so you could conceivably use it as a stopwatch, or a timer. And yet, doing so seems absurd, because we want things to be precise, visible and immediate. Wick is none of those things.

In class, one of my fellow students called the piece "frustrating.” I love that — because to me that is one way to describe trying to wrap your mind around time and scale and motion. It’s an exercise that forces us to be uncomfortable. To wait, and to look closely, and to wonder whether or not the scale and speed we operate at is the only one worth trying.