Modelling for art academies provided me with another approach to the volume I occupied. Sitting still for hours, I contemplated my surroundings, and the limits between myself and the ambient air disappeared. I breathed in and out; I filled the room as it filled me. I visualised my own volume, out in space, as an aerial body. I wondered how it related to each of my respiratory volumes.
Studies in motionlessness (ed.2/10), 2021, 27 photographs and fineliner on paper, as a model-made supplement to Eadweard Muybridge’s ‘The human figure in motion’
This led me to design a scaled hoop. This way, I could blow a balloon up to the volume I had established to be mine. As the balloon reached the hoop’s outlines, I knew it to be precisely as big as me, but subjectively, it felt much smaller. Following this method, 27 exhales sufficed to scale a life-size self-portrait.
At last, I placed my twenty-seven breaths in the context where they belonged: the studio I felt one with. Here is the ecstasy I had imagined - rightly scaled:
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/19594b7d93dd8f19db36a3c9684e28b9701b64852a88b36bbff632af78f985af/4.jpg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3e6dd1390028aab303401f42ae52ebb84373c7aae83cf9dc18a95f27392551e4/-big-art-breathing-wall-3-lighter.jpg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/77169683c071916d341d8c6791a1c99c806c620e827567cb9a21edff172f50c0/speculum-9.jpg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f7626af77e89005b15924d3c6eb4f1368a670dbbe3fbb9e9455d04dceed35dd6/speculum-10.jpg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d3f1d2b0ceca744e7b7d80a4a9d11e874b0ace0de902254ce976ddb3b417e4f9/speculum-8.jpg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7cda113a4b51e51ee5590eff7e2416abc80cc9e9d4c7e928b09e7183ce998e59/speculum-12.jpg)
(Each of the twenty-seven works were balloons, which I could scale to a twenty-seventh of myself with a mould. I have let some of them decrease, but marked each centimeter of their initial diameters.)