Jo Wood

This brief instant…..

Perspex, Acrylic Mirrors, Beading Wire, additional tbc

“Time is a sort of river of passing events and strong is its current, no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept away and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away”. From Meditations by Marcus Aurelius 121-180 CE

“Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it. Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived or is impossible to see”. From Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Perhaps this can all be summarised very simply: life is short, make better choices with your time.

Linking a view of an ever changing, temporary world with an interest in Stoic Philosophy Jo Wood presents the reflective kinetic sculpture ‘This brief instant…’ Since c. 300 B.C.E. the Stoic thinkers have reflected on how short peoples lives are and they suggest that virtue is the only true good and virtue in itself will bring happiness, regardless of one’s circumstances.

This brief instant… uses the relatively modern boundaries of the Peel region to indicate place. 40,000 years before white settlement of Australia, this area of land was where three tribes of the Noongar people had lived; the Bindjareb, the Wadjuk and the Wardandi. Water is significant and abundant in the Peel region. In the local Noongar dialect Binjar/Pinjar means a place where salt and fresh waters meet, a swamp, a wetland, an estuary. A body of water shows simply how the world is constantly changing, ever in motion, yet never moving in exactly the same way.  For Wood it represents all energies, activities and life journeys.

This brief instant… is a mechanism to help the viewer stop, reflect, be still in the moment, to feel gratitude for life. To live each day as if it were the last and to strive in deeds to leave an archive of good.

Jo Wood is an artist and printmaker from Sydney, now living in Western Australia. Wood draws and sketches the surrounding world and uses these materials to inspire the design and creation of colourful screenprints on paper and fabric, and more recently, colour reduction linocuts.