A living flame, wholly on fire yet not consumed — one self remade, that the dark can no longer take back. The place the whole series resolves.
A real-time work, computed live and never repeating. The slowest and warmest thing in the series — and the only one that arrives.
A figure of flame stands in the museum dark — Precipitate's restless molten figure returned as fire: warm where that was cold, rising where that fell, crowned with light where that crown set hard and fell away. It is the burning bush of Exodus 3, wholly aflame yet not consumed — a form held not by setting hard but by ceaseless flow, and so it cannot fossilise. The body burns and ascends; embers lift off it and rise into the dark — the exact inverse of the drops that fell from the first piece into oblivion. Here nothing is lost. At its crown, nine tongues of fire, each its own colour and each lifting its own voice: the fruits of the Spirit — love at the root the rest rise from, then joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and the self-control that holds a fire to a shape instead of a wildfire. The figure leans and breathes and slowly turns, never guttering, never the same. Order that needs no law, because it is alive.
The whole series has circled the one thing that truly consumes us: the slow entropy of a finite, fallible memory — the self lost, a little at a time, into the dark. This is the answer it has been withholding. Not a better memory, not a safer archive, but a self that is held — remade in the image of God, the way the bush burned and was not consumed. The fire is the slow work of being made new; the nine tongues are the qualities that do the remaking; the warmth the first five pieces watched fail and fall away is here, at last, kept. It is the same self the series began with — the same notes, even — reorganised from grief into grace.
Where every other piece withholds the warming third, here it arrives, and stays: the series' bare open fifth resolves into a full major chord. The harmony breathes, glacially, between the C minor of the first piece's lament and the E♭ major of grace — the same seven notes, reorganised, over and over, never the same. Nine warm voices, one per fruit, sustain and bloom instead of decaying — sound that burns and is not consumed; love is the low note they all rise from. Now and then a single tongue lifts its voice and sings, in its own register and colour. A soft bell rings on each ember as it ascends. And rarely, a wind moves through the figure — the flame streams upward, a host of embers lifts off at once, the chord swells wide: the breath that fills the room.
Against Such Things is the sixth and closing piece of the series — What Remains — on the fragility of memory, individual and collective. It is the capstone: the one piece that resolves the tension every other holds open — the warm answer to Precipitate's cold question, the living third between Doctrine's frozen monument and Tideline's emptying tide. Light against the dark; order that needs no law. It was designed first — the fixed point the whole series was always moving toward — and shown last, after the dark has been felt, because a redemption revealed too early is no redemption at all. The series precipitates into it.
Joshua Borsman makes sculpture, sound, and kinetic work — staged in galleries, gardens, sidewalks, and orbit. The pieces take real processes and signals and turn them into work that unfolds in time and refuses to repeat. joshuaborsman.com
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