A study for Half-Life, t½

A study for Half-Life, t½
2023
Bismuth on canvas
62x62x10cm

A proof-of-concept painted study for the full scale Half-Life, t½ painting. Half-Life, t½ (2023) continues the artist’s examination of the fundamentals of painting and its deconstruction to first principles. The artist’s use of pure elemental metal in lieu of paint, continues in this work, using the rare Earth metal, Bismuth. Chosen for its lustrous, chromatic colour when oxidised by heat, the metal also holds temporal significance; An isotope of Bismuth holds the record for the longest half-life of any element in our known universe at 200,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. Half-life is the time taken for 50% of a quantity to decay, presenting a way to give a determinate value to something truly random and stochastic. The painting reflects on the artist’s experience with his own impermanence, decay, and the indeterminacy associated with our corporeal being. While many, many orders of magnitude less than Bismuth, existentially, we too each have our own effective half-life.

作品旨在驗證全尺寸畫作《Half-Life, t½ 》的概念。 《Half-Life, t½》（2023）中藝術家如常考察繪畫的本質，解構第一原理。這件作品由稀土金屬鉍繪製而成，沿用了藝術家擅用純元素金屬代替繪畫顏料的創作模式。 鉍金屬受熱氧化後呈現出光澤和色彩，擁有時間意義。而鉍的同位素則保持著我們已知宇宙中任何元素最長半衰期的記錄—200,000,000,000,000,000,000年。 半衰期是放射性原子核衰變至數目僅得原來一半所需的時間，提供了一種賦予真正隨機的事物確定值的方法。 這幅畫反映了藝術家對自身無常、衰退以及不確定有形存在的體驗。雖然比鉍少很多很多，但從存在上，我們每個人都有自己的有效半衰期。