Constructing a Pink Wafer Tower

The scene depicts a portrait of a girl, 'lost in thought’, sat at the family dining room table. She is absorbed in a playful and performative act, one which appears to be without purpose or reason.  The repetitious and mundane action evokes a certain meditative stillness and order. 

The methodical and playful process of building a pink wafer tower, gradually declines into disorder and chaos. 

The concept of this piece attempts to examine the subject’s expression at the precise moment between order and the immediate consequence of the structure’s collapse.

The representation of the figure held in an absorptive introspective state is a device that serves to create and manifest absorption within the viewer.  ‘The primacy of absorption’, articulated through the writings of modernist art critic and art historian Michael Fried;

’A personage entirely absorbed or engrossed in an action, feeling, or state of mind is by virtue of that fact wholly unaware of anything but the object of his or her absorption, starting with the beholder standing before the painting’.