Exhaust

David Rickard sits in a chair in a London warehouse. He is dressed in a white boiler suit, with a medical respiratory mask strapped around his face. For 24 hours he meticulously collects every one of his exhalations in a series of silver foil balloons. As the performance continues, the balloons pile up behind him.

The title of the work, Exhaust, points both towards contemporary realities and dystopic futures, where the simple act of breath is transformed into laborious task. The performance confronts us with our reliance on the hidden atmospheres around us, using white cloth and silver sculpture to evoke imagery of a sanitised, alien future.

All the time, we listen to a hard, deep, inhale and exhale, drawing in and out of the hospital apparatus, and wonder what the world outside of the filmed space might look like.