Waiting Room

Raewyn Turner & Brian Harris 2022

Waiting Room 2022 Raewyn Turner & Brian Harris. Performance Arcade, Wellington

Waiting Room is a space to reflect on inertia and waiting, punctuated by the ticking of kinetic pendulums and measured by the chaotic motion of the double pendulum clock set in an atmosphere referring to parosmia and smell distortion due to covid.

We made a double pendulum and five copper pendulums which also doubled as smell dispensers of odours that refer to parosmia and smell distortion due to Covid-19. The odours of over-ripe fruit, wet dog, mould and burning were periodically offset by an intense rose fragrance. The pendulum arms were weighted with recycled hard drive disks.

..let us recall that time, as Einstein...explained, is not linear but circular. Our lives are not points on a line – a line which is today being amputated by the Instant Greed of the unprecedented global capitalist order...rather, we are the centers of circles. The circles surround us with testaments addressed to us by our predecessors...and by texts...from nature, from the universe, and they remind us that symmetry co-exists with chaos, that ingenuities outflank fatalities, that what is desired is more reassuring than what is promised...We will learn to wait in solidarity'. John Berger, Confabulations 2016

Waiting Room. Raewyn Turner & Brian Harris. Container Series, Performance Arcade, Wellington 2022

We wanted petals to drop from the roses on the pendulums to signify the passing of time. This was in part inspired by bunches of David Austin roses that always had abundant petals dropping from them all over the table where we worked on the project. Also we'd noticed the drama of the falling of petals in a previous installation 'Fallible'. In our first tests we used commercially bought roses but we found that they didn't drop their petals as expected. This necessitated further research which revealed the 'self cleansing' nature of certain rose varieties, and subsequent trips to the rose gardens to see if we could 'spot the difference'.

Thanks to Denise Munster and Hutt Valley Rose Society.