Aeternitas & Persephone

In ancient Roman religion, Aeternitas was the divine personification of eternity.

Persephone was the Greek Goddess of Spring, and is used here as a symbol of the annual cycle of life and the passage of time.

This artwork expresses the concept of perpetual change, and cyclical repetition. Everything is in constant change, evolving towards the next edition of itself. Simultaneously, everything is cyclical in nature, flowing around a metaphorical wheel and arriving where it began.

This artwork was born from ideas that started in Samsara, another artwork by Stuart Ward created earlier in 2021. Instead of flowing through the center of the wheel, in this representation of continuity, the scene evolves ever upwards, as though progress is being made, but the progress made ends up in the same place it began.

The spirit universe transcends space and time, making it difficult to express within the limits of space and time. The journey towards transcendence, enlightenment, or self fulfillment ends where it began, as beings of infinite possibility, ready for another lap of self experience through the perspective of individuality. In the end, physically we are cosmic dust, waiting for the finality of heat death. Spiritually, we’re uncoupled from the temporal and physical limits of the universe. We are free to go around again.

The artwork was originally created without Persephone, but the sculptural form of the Goddess was later included and refinished.

Stylistically, the artwork reveals a visual representation of an architectural space without gravity. Visually, we’re connected to a frame of reference that suggests an up and down, through the orientation of the artwork in relation to the viewer’s referential ‘up’. The initial working files for the artwork was ‘Zero Gravity Neo-Baroque’, an expression of the possibilities available when restrictions are removed.

NeoBaroque continues where Baroque left off, with the added benefit of expressing the physically impossible with digital graphics. In addition to leaving the rules of physicality behind, the structure of religious hegemony has been removed from the NeoBaroque, and replaced in this work with a sense of unmediated connection to the infinite.

This artwork has been digitally created for a digital world. It is indigenous to the digital landscape; representations as a physical piece are duplicates of the original digital.

The video is a 1080x1920 x 15 second seamless loop, intended for display on a portrait format screen.