LOOK WITHIN
MEDITATIONS begins with a paradox: a mirror, an object made for looking at the surface, asks
us to “LOOK WITHIN”.
The work draws on the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, a collection of thoughts written not for an audience, but for himself.
As Roman emperor, Aurelius occupied a position of immense external authority; yet his writing repeatedly returns to the limits of that authority. The world around us cannot be fully governed. Events, other people, circumstance and change remain beyond our command. What can be governed is the way we meet them: our judgement, our attention, our response. That is the boundary.
For Aurelius, this inner space was not a retreat
from the world, but the place from which one could act within it.
MEDITATIONS gives physical form to this idea through marble and reflective stainless steel. A folded, L-shaped mirror needs the weight of an abstracted column. Its polished surface receives the surrounding space, the architecture and, inevitably, the person standing before it.
The marble column is articulated by twelve flutes, corresponding to the twelve books of Aurelius’ Meditations. An inscription is concealed from direct sight. It becomes legible only
through the mirror: “LOOK WITHIN”.
The mirror transforms this instruction into an experience. To read the words, the viewer must encounter them through their own reflection. At the very moment the mirror returns an outward image, a face, a body, an appearance.
The inscription redirects attention away from that image where the object performs a subtle reversal: what normally serves self-observation becomes an invitation to self-inquiry. The reflection is therefore not merely an image within MEDITATIONS. It is part of its structure. The work remains incomplete without someone standing before it.
The twelve books belong to Aurelius. The next meditation belongs to the viewer. In this encounter, the boundary between object and observer becomes uncertain. Marble remains solid, steel remains cold. The physical limits of the work do not disappear. Yet its meaning begins precisely where those limits end, in the space between the inscription, its reflection and the person reading it.
MEDITATIONS does not ask the viewer to escape the world outside.
It asks where, within it, they choose to stand.