Eudaimonia Rm.1 (2023), found object, wooden boards, carpet, computer, ticket dispenser, ~3.5x15x15 m.
Eudaimonia Rm.1 (2023), found object, wooden boards, carpet, computer, ticket dispenser, ~3.5x15x15 m.
Eudaimonia Rm.2 (2023), found object, wooden boards, carpet, glass, milk, leather, steel, ~3.5x15x15 m.
Eudaimonia Rm.2 (2023), found object, wooden boards, carpet, glass, milk, leather, steel, ~3.5x15x15 m.
Eudaimonia Rm.3 (2023), found object, wooden boards, carpet, steel, electronics, two live rats, ~3.5x15x15 m.
Eudaimonia Rm.3 (2023), found object, wooden boards, carpet, steel, electronics, two live rats, ~3.5x15x15 m.
Eudaimonia Rm.4 (2023), found object, wooden boards, steel, electronics, engine oil, raw chicken, ~3.5x15x15 m.
Eudaimonia Rm.4 (2023), found object, wooden boards, steel, electronics, engine oil, raw chicken, ~3.5x15x15 m.
Eudaimonia
2023
Loughborough University BA FA Studios, UK.
July 14th - 19th 2023
Eudaimonia is a four-room installation tracing the consumerist life course through its familiar stages: childhood, employment, and retirement. Each room holds sculptures that perform a role belonging to its stage, whether through ageing, the development of instrumental rationalisations, or the maintenance of a skill. Across the sequence, the supposed rewards of labour are set alongside the actions that produce them, and the industrial processes underwriting consumer comfort are made visible.
Room 1, Waiting Room. A real-world space standing in for a pre-birth state, positioning the visitor as a powerless participant. The room and its contents stand for the corporate body; the staff within it for its passive enablers. The rooms that follow run chronologically.
Room 2. New-age motherhood, and the interdependency between the mother, the home, and the industrial effort that produces the child's surroundings.
Room 3. Positive reinforcement in labour and reward. A machine trains rats by means of a running wheel that, when used, dispenses a more nutritious food than the one freely available. The work draws on compensation theory to set out the associations that form between labour and reward, and the illusory quality of decisions about how time is spent.
Room 4. The persistence of that connection into retirement, with motorbike restoration as its case. Behaviours trained by working life are shown carrying into private character after employment ends. The chicken and the steels extend this through the act of polishing metal, at once industrial and specific to restoration work.
Eudaimonia (2023), Performance Documentation.