Acedia
Exhibited at Craft Victoria, 2026

Acedia takes its name from one of the oldest words for boredom. Fourth-century Desert Fathers (monks, Christian hermits and ascetics) named akēdia — "a lack of care" — the midday spiritual apathy or restlessness they called the "noonday demon" which made the sun seem to stop.

In this work, I set this theological account against Walter Benjamin's later, secular one: in The Arcades Project, he calls boredom "a warm gray fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful of silks. In this fabric we wrap ourselves when we dream" — elsewhere, "the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience", "the threshold to great deeds". Where the monastic tradition feared acedia as spiritual danger, Benjamin held boredom as both modernity's deadening "hell" of repetition and a threshold — productive only when paired with its dialectical opposite, action.

While making this work, I made this literal in thread and glass. Hand loom-woven over hours, the surface is a dense, silvery-grey field of sterling silver-plated glass beads, its evenness broken by a static-like scatter of darker beads reading as noise or the residue of long looking. Two looping black forms drift across it like an unfinished signature, echoing Benjamin's dream bird, mid-flight. Above and below, unworked threads curl outward in long skeins — as if the silk lining had slipped from beneath its grey exterior.

Acedia inhabits boredom's structure rather than illustrating it — slow labour producing, out of monotony, something luminous.