2013

Birth day is a project that charts the 183,600 lives that come into being on the plan­et over a peri­od of 12 hours. The par­tic­i­pants draw cir­cles to remem­ber loved ones and also reg­is­ter their names in writ­ing. In this way the pub­lic are asked to con­nect their own per­son­al nar­ra­tive to the much broad­er theme of pop­u­la­tion growth and decline.

Artist state­ment:

“By the time you’ve read this sen­tence three peo­ple have been born into the world.

By the time you’ve read this sen­tence two will have passed away. By the time you’ve lived through this eight-hour day there will be 122,000 more chil­dren on the plan­et. And in the same eight hours 51,000 peo­ple will have passed away.

From observ­ing this process I have noticed that the moment a per­son draws a cir­cle (and it has a name) the art­work stops being about sta­tis­tics and becomes a wall of broth­ers, sis­ters, moth­ers etc — in this par­tic­u­lar case rep­re­sent­ing 260,000 lives that are born and die in 12 hours.

We use data to quan­ti­fy the world, yet even on such per­ti­nent themes of birth and death, once we pass a cer­tain scale the infor­ma­tion slips into either obscu­ri­ty or trivia.”

‘Birth day’ is a work that address’s this sub­ject by using strate­gies such as mark mak­ing and sto­ry telling to give us a con­text in which to under­stand some of these larg­er movements.