KAIROS

What happens when an artwork forms itself?

KAIROS emerges from mycelium: I provide the conditions such as humidity and temperature, but from there the sculpture takes its own course. It is a living object, a process, in which material, time and transience are inextricably linked. KAIROS develops over the course of its lifetime: it grows, matures and decays.

KAIROS does not depict time — it is time itself.

In this work, biological processes determine form and meaning. It is not predictable how growth, desiccation and decay will change the form, structure and materiality of a living mycelium sculpture. By following this process, I investigate how the meaning of a work can change along with the matter. When the mycelium grows, loses structure and finally falls apart: what then happens to the work? And what remains of it?

KAIROS builds on my earlier projects in which time plays a central role. In my photography I made time visible; in the installation AEON I explored the experience of infinity and cyclical time. RESONANCE is about how we relate to our own history. KAIROS is a next step in which this investigation of time extends to time that unfolds within the matter itself: a succession of moments in which the matter takes shape on its own terms.