Speaking of how it was before 2026 – 40 x 30cm, acrylic, spray paint on canvas
The title is from Beckett, the retrospective construction that mirrors its companion, Speaking of How It Will Be After 2026. Before the enclosure. Before the managed specimen environment with its chronic leakage. Before the tray. What was the garden then, and what did it know about what was coming?
The painting is a laboratory, or the template of one, the generic logic of managed enclosure that underlies the specific sites the series has been documenting.
Below the tray’s edge, a white ledge carries the evidence of what the laboratory produces: gold and dark residue along the lower boundary, the seepage of a system working as designed. This is chronic leakage rather than catastrophic failure — the steady byproduct of managed growth finding its own path downward, the grey-blue ground below receiving what the enclosure expels. The tray is not sealed. It never was.
A small dark rectangle floats in this atmospheric zone: monolith, screen, vent, the marker of human infrastructure in an environment that didn’t expect it.
Speaking of how it was before: the flowers in the zone are speaking of it now, growing in their managed medium, their void-centred apertures open toward a sky they can see but not reach. Before the enclosure they were simply flowers. Inside it they are specimens, their growth observed, their leakage collected, their sky visible through the frame of what contains them.