Stephen Hobbs is a South African artist based in Ireland.

In the artist’s words: “Whilst traipsing down a narrow road in Dungarvan, County Waterford, Ireland, I came across two woman preparing the frontage of their soon-to-be-opened bakery. They were up on a ladder, busy removing the signage that belonged to the previous eatery – Raj Balti House. I asked if I could have the letters which they happily prepared for me in a black plastic bag.

The stop motion treatment of the letters making sense of themselves, as if in a game of scrabble, is accompanied by the sound of the sea at Myrtleville Beach in Cork. The intense gurgling of the pebbles as the tide pulls back into the sea is beautiful and hypnotic. Indeed, the recording is a trace of one of our last visits before lock down. The rest is history, except to say that the bakery owners' efforts and, more importantly their dreams, have halted all together as lockdown came upon us days later. Today they tell me they should be reopening in June / July”

Concept & Creation | Stephen Hobbs
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

This piece was featured alongside 28 other Long Minute videos at the ‘Unprecedented Times’ exhibition in Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria which ran from 5 June to 30 August 2020.