Questa è Acqua

Water is fundamental to humans; as a species, we are made of fifty to seventy-five percent water. The mirror-polished spheres that compose the works from Hurst’s Water Series suggest bubbles rising in water. In the contemporary world, where people increasingly are inwardly focused and strongly divided on many issues, the bubbles symbolize the elements of our shared humanity rising to the water’s surface. In this way, Hurst’s Water Series strives to represent the common ground in the human experience.

Works in the Water Series are inspired in part by a commencement address by author David Foster Wallace, "This Is Water” (later a published essay of the same name). In the speech, Wallace highlights the importance of choice in how we see and think about our world. He posits that “if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then…it will be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars.” That is, in confronting even the most mundane and frustrating parts of contemporary adult life, it is within our power to choose to see “the subsurface unity of all things.”

Hurst also finds inspiration for the Water Series in the disciplines of mathematics and astrophysics; in particular, a principle of quantum mechanics called “von Neumann entropy.” Expressed as a complex mathematical formula, the principle encapsulates the philosophical idea that, without knowing for certain, the unseen world can be more than one thing at the same time. However far-fetched the possibilities may seem, they are not impossible. Viewed through this lens, the “bubbles” in the Water Series represent events occurring within the “water” of our shared experience. They encourage viewers to see their world from new vantage points and, in doing so, to see the marvelous possibilities that exist all at once.