Slow Art

Speed is man’s most recent vice. 

The old vices like sex, drugs, alcohol, greed and power have been around for thousands of years. 

But speed is our new drug. 

I don’t mean amphetamines… I mean literal speed… quickness, velocity,

Our pace is the race we’re in. 
The clock has become our false god. 

For thousands of years mankind travelled at the speed-of-feet, the distance covered by a day’s walking. Approximately 3mph. A soul’s pace, a natural, sustainable rhythm. Then at some point in our human history we learned to ride horses, donkeys and camels, and our collective pace increased tenfold to about 30 mph. 

Then we harnessed the wind and sailed the seas.
We broke borders and travelled the globe.  

It’s only been in the last century (a relative blip in our collective human history) that a fuel source beyond the organic pace of animal-biology or wind-speed has allowed us to move at a quantum pace. Burning fossil fuels (coal) to release water’s power as steam birthed irreversible global change, then decades later the confined explosive combustion of petrol, diesel & kerosine took us past the speed of sound. 

We can travel faster than sonic waves. 
We can arrive before the news of our arrival. 
It’s no wonder we are a distracted, frenetic, and hurried people. 

We feel that we are behind, somehow playing catch-up with an imaginary version of ourselves, a pretend vision of where we think we should be by now. We feel late, as if we missed the plane, and everything & everyone is already ahead of us, ahead of where we “should” be, and we are left here in an imaginary past, but which is really the present and yet we feel we have missed out. Missed the boat. Missed the rocket. Missed the chance to buy before the curve. We feel we missed the moment. FOMO is a cruel slave driver.

I call it ghosting. 
Our soul is off in an imagined future, instead of being grounded here in the present, in the now. 
So we are fractured, glitching. 

It’s exhausting. 
It’s unsustainable. 
No wonder anti-depressants are the drug of choice in our day. 
It’s hard to maintain this insane pace, and agony to experience the fracturing of the human psyche. 

It’s microwave culture. The frustration we feel at having to wait 60 seconds when we need it done NOW.  Or the fury at waiting 5 seconds for YouTube to let us hit Skip Ad.

Madness. 

So in all the fast fuelled mayhem I decided to go backwards. 
Reverse the trend, swim against the pull of the collective current, regress the quantum-rip-tide. 

I decided to do something as a shock to my system and so I chose to slow down. 

Slow right down.

I’m finding different rhythms, making work that requires my team and I to take 3, 4, sometimes 6 months to complete. 

The work is exacting, the gleaming detail is missed when travelling at high speed. 
A deeper focus is only achievable at a much slower pace. 

I hope you enjoy the work, and I pray you find the courage to unplug, detach and breathe. 
The missed detail is worth slowing down for. 

Mark Evans 
July 2020
London