The Ends

Notes

While grounded in material practice, the artist's sculpture often returns to language, etymology and myth, as a kind of cultural geology which connects words to matter and reveals text as sediment of popular beliefs. Conceived in the suspended atmosphere of a pandemic, The Ends is a typographic work that presents a contemporary mythology of endings. Through a chronological catalogue of apocalyptic and dystopian fantasies, drawn largely from cinema, it becomes a free-associative found-text poem tracing a persistent cultural obsession: the end as spectacle. The study of end times, or eschatology, has long been animated by existential angst, an expression of the same cognitive capacity that enabled humanity to dominate the planet. Speculative fictions rehearse catastrophe yet introduce a reprieve: a hero, an escape route, the possibility of renewal. Alongside the 'unknown unknowns' of impact events and so-called grey goo scenarios, these narratives also shadow familiar fears: of the Other, of colonial trauma, of competition over scarce resources, nuclear fallout, climate collapse, pandemics, and the corrosion of truth in an age of misinformation. Each decade signals shifting cultural preoccupations with threat: alien invasions and contaminations that echo ancient dreads of the outside force; the atomic anxieties of the 1950s; the ecological collapses of the 1970s; the cybernetic fears of the 1990s. Running through these cycles is a mythic arc of figures, resembling the genealogy of mythology itself. Early narratives imagine hostile nonhuman life, plants, creatures, or extraterrestrials - while later cycles foreground lone survivors, demi-godlike warriors, and finally the pantheon of superheroes saturating cinema around the pandemic. Neuroscience suggests why such stories endure. Research into the fear system shows that apocalyptic beliefs can make mortality feel less chaotic, more predictable. Symbolic excess becomes a coping mechanism, offering narrative containment for what cannot be controlled - while paradoxically diminishing a sense of agency by implying inevitability. Other studies note that pain is more tolerable when anticipated than when unexpected 2 . So perhaps these stories serve to mitigate dread, to rehearse loss, and to practice survival in the realm of the imagination - a form of speculative preparedness in itself. At the same time, apocalypse is also aesthetic: burning skies, collapsing cityscapes, floods, deserts and wastelands become sublime theatre. In rehearsing the End, such narratives also rehearse wonder. The Ends holds this paradox in view: an archive of ruin and, simultaneously, a meditation on the resilience of imagination itself.