Oliver Barstow is a designer, editor, and book publisher in the visual arts sector.
In Barstow’s words: “This work came from a recent dream about the pencil trick, the one where, by holding a pencil between thumb and index finger and shaking it up and down, it appears to bend, a solid rendered suddenly flexible. The dream came with a readymade sentence, or title of sorts attached to it: 'the difficulty in describing the nature of reality'. At the time, I was reading a book about the relationship between mind and matter by the philosopher Jefferey J. Kripal, so I guess this somehow triggered the dream and its associated text. A few weeks later, during the lockdown, I set about trying to remake the pencil trick, but in doing so, substituting the hand with a pendulum mechanism. In reading about pendulums, I learnt that the period – the time it takes to describe its arc – depends on the length of the pendulum. Interested in this variable, one pencil and pendulum became a set of four, each pencil sharpened to a different length. The making itself introduced further variables or 'imperfections' into the system – the difficulty in attaching the pendulum mechanisms to one another, the difficulty in joining the pencils to the pendulum arms, the difficulty in hanging the whole thing on the wall, and so on. As it works, none of the arcs or periods described by the pencils is consistent or accurate. As these variables cause them to speed up or slow down, at some points they are in unison to one another, at others in opposition. Their movement is complex, uncertain and almost impossible to describe.”
Concept & Creation | Oliver Barstow
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace