Seven magpies are stacked atop one another, similar in form to the animals from the Brothers Grimm tale ‘The Town Musicians of Bremen.’ The work is titled in reference to the UK folk poem/nursery rhyme, which goes:

“One for Sorrow, Two for joy
Three for a girl, Four for a boy
Five for silver, Six for gold
Seven for a secret, never to be told”

Notes on Size: 65.7x43.8cm image reproduction with 2.5cm border.

The piece ‘run’ (2024) incorporates, in each unit, a treadmill with moving image text projection and durational performance activations. The treadmill runs slowly, with text projection synchronised to perfectly match the speed of the belt. For the activations, both the treadmill and text are sped up, and a runner runs on the treadmill for a set duration whilst reading the text aloud as it scrolls across the phone.

The script is the full definition of ‘run’ in verb, noun, and adjective forms as it appears in the O.E.D’s (Oxford English Dictionary) current edition (2011). This contains 371 separate meanings for the word, the second highest in the English language after ‘set’; however, O.E.D. announced in 2021 that in the forthcoming edition (2037), the definition of ‘run’ will further expand to a total of 645 meanings, overtaking ‘set’ to become the longest definition in the English language. The majority of these definitions account for increased usage of ‘run’ in newly emerging operational, technological, and computational contexts. The suggestion is twofold, that the development of the word is indicative of the (English-speaking) world ever more in a state of activity over settledness, and that conversely, the manner of that activity is ever more fixed in place.

Seven magpies are stacked atop one another, similar in form to the animals from the Brothers Grimm tale ‘The Town Musicians of Bremen’. The work is titled in reference to the UK folk poem/nursery rhyme, which goes:

“One for Sorrow, Two for joy
Three for a girl, Four for a boy
Five for silver, Six for gold
Seven for a secret, never to be told”