Sparks, drifting and the shaping of time

I had seen images of ‘in the end, the beginning’ by Arcangelo Sassolino at Mona and thought Kirsty, the family firebug, would love it. I didn’t know much about Sassolino’s work.

Walking into ‘in the end, the beginning’, I felt held in a state of uncertainty. Wood straining to splinter, glass bending towards collapse, steel dissolving into fire and light. Each work seemed less like an object and more like an event, something already moving before I arrived, and still shifting as I left.

The curators call these installations “psychological traps”, moments of suspense that catch us as witnesses. Sassolino himself speaks of sculpture flowing like time, alive to the forces that shaped it.

At the centre of ‘in the end, the beginning’, a network of steel crucibles hung from the ceiling. Inside each, molten metal was heated to more than 1500 degrees. At random intervals, droplets broke free, falling through the darkness and hissing into shallow pans of water below. Each impact sent up a burst of steam and light.

Watching the sparks fall, I kept searching for a rhythm. Was there a cycle—day and night, season, tide? But the sparks dropped without a pattern. Time here felt unsteady, random, circular only in name.

The curators describe Sassolino’s work as a reminder of our impermanence. In Buddhist thought, impermanence is a principle that shapes every moment of existence. Everything that arises passes away. Nothing is fixed, not even the self that observes it.

In Sassolino’s gallery, impermanence is not gentle or lyrical. It is mechanical, relentless, and real. Steel melts. Glass buckles. Beams snap. The word becomes physical, stripped of sentiment. Watching the works, I felt that shift,from the poetic idea of transience to the lived experience of matter giving way.

As I left Mona, I thought about how my own installations already hold this same thread of impermanence, but in a quieter register. Something less violent, more like fog thinning or tide receding. Sassolino shows the brutal edge of change. I work with its gentler forms.

My practice explores time as a quiet force. In my installations, time unfolds through slow change, natural elements, and the rhythms of embodied perception. Some works respond to the viewer’s presence, using sensors or cameras to track movement. Others unfold gradually on their own. In both, transformation is subtle, cyclical, and often barely visible, like a rock slowly moving, fog revealing an island, or ice disappearing into the ground. These small shifts ask viewers to pause and notice time differently.