Zoë Wonfor

staring at the sun with your eyes closed

The apparent position of an hour

Emergency Art Space, Vevey, Switzerland
Collaboration with Lauren Chipeur & April Martin

The numbers on a clock forecast a pattern. We found the patterns in the ceiling, marking arrangements ahead of us, resembling the holes on the foam boards we found behind the shopping centre, or was it a school? We take a bus to Hornbach, it drops us off in the back next to an assortment of plants waiting to be thrown away. We take some chives and hot peppers, people are suspicious, they ask us if we are searching for something. Yes, searching, we are always searching.

We find out the orange berries we keep seeing are called Pyracantha, known colloquially as orange glow or scarlet firethorn. What did you google again? ‘Small orange berries / bush / switzerland / thorns” ? They have incredible thorns, a warning maybe, since they aren’t good to eat raw. Like apples their seeds are full of arsenic, but probably not enough to kill you. We pass our time stringing these tiny berries onto threads. We call them jube jubes but really they are pyracantha pomes. They used to feel so rare and special, but now we can see them everywhere. Are the orange ones sweeter than the yellow?

In the same way that one comes to know most things, we saw them once and then we saw them everywhere. Could it be that if something becomes so apparent, you stop seeing it all together? Is there a danger in knowing too well? We collect them, we pull their foliage off and take their stems out, we wash them. We invented a washing system using a public water fountain next to the Nestlé building and an old plastic plant container from the back of Hornbach with holes in the bottom. A very sad, but functional, colander, not to be mistaken with a calendar. We still need to make the jam.

(Pyracanthas pomes, dried maidenstears, thread, brass screws, pre-existing holes in ceiling, plastic sheeting, copper tubing, plastic hose, tape, plastic PET bottles collected from residents of Vevey, water from Lake Geneva, air dry clay, mis-dyed gypsum blocks, glacier water, found felt board, homemade air dry clay (bicarbonate of soda, corn starch, water) dyed with egg yolk pigment, straight pins.)

Staring at the sun with your eyes closed

Untitled Art Society, Calgary, AB (2016)
Collaboration with Lauren Chipeur & April Martin

Newsprint, raw shea butter, glass construction bricks, clay, double backed insulation foil, prairie grass, fluorescent lights, iridescent gift wrap, static plastic sheeting, packing tape, porcelain, latex tubing, desk lamp