Good Time Generator (2020)

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Plaster, wood, felted fleece, paper, soil samples (Benhill Road Nature Garden/code Purple; Bussey Building/code Green)
Dimensions variable

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Lying within fleece lined crates, insulated to stave off the metabolic present and a cosmic future trauma. These aestivating common earthworms are more than simulacra. Earthworms perform this marvel when the soil heats up and dries out, it’s the opposite of hibernation. Consistent with a tendency toward radical transformation and attending to imaginary and nonhuman life, Good Time Generator responds to the existential threat of climate emergency and sameness. The sculpture is rooted in an active withdrawal from human time defined by the temporalities of capitalism and cultivates the twin heresies of earthly secrets and silence as resistance to planetary, societal and individualised fragility. Indifferent to deep empathy and tightly knotted in revolutions of de-production they are haptic forms, harbingers of the uncanny and self-buried.

The earthworm figures are counterparts in an ongoing collaborative project developed with Joanna Brinton ‘A Symbiotic Association’. Initially, generated between three south London sites: Occupation Studios, Good Studio/Bussey Building and Benhill Road Nature Garden, the project is documented in the publication ‘The Worm is Turning’. The pandemic has bought environmental exploits into relief. Embodying observation of degradation and renewal, ‘Good Time Generator’ invites unruly forces, creating a community interconnecting the living, dormant and the dead.