Spiral of Patience

Artwork ID: BBB001 Spiral of Patience
Dimensions: 3.0 m (W) × 2.5 m (D) × 7.5 m (H)
Materials: 17,767 white paper cups, hand-stacked installation
Year: 2026

The road to the stars is not a straight line.
A single spire rises seven and a half metres from the gallery floor, hand-stacked from 17,767 white paper cups. From a distance it reads as a thin column of light; up close, the surface dissolves into thousands of fragile units, each one crushable in a single hand. Seventeen thousand seven hundred sixty-seven of them, standing four times the height of a person.

Look closely and the surface is not flat. The cups wind around the vertical axis in a spiral — the same configuration found in the arms of NGC 1365, a barred spiral galaxy 56 million light-years from Earth, turning slowly, indifferent to whether anyone is watching.

This work does not treat space through speed, machinery, or spectacle. It treats space through patience. The road to the stars is not a straight line drawn by a single ignition; it is a slow curve winding through time. Each cup becomes a unit of that motion — one cup of waiting, one cup of repetition, one cup of correction. Alone, the unit is weightless and almost meaningless. Placed precisely on top of 17,766 others, it becomes a tower seven and a half metres tall.

Not the narrative of conquest, but the narrative of accumulation. Not one heroic launch, but centuries of quiet adding-on.
The spiral also moves the viewer. Walk slowly around the work and the form keeps changing face — surfaces opening and closing, curves swelling and narrowing, vertical ascent inseparable from circular motion. The piece does not ask only to be looked up at. It asks to be walked beside, followed in time, breathed alongside.

In an age that increasingly describes space exploration in the language of faster rockets and larger capital, Spiral of Patience proposes the opposite direction: a journey to the stars imagined as something quieter, older, and more human. One fragile gesture, then another, then another, until the accumulation finally points at the sky.
The 17,767 cups will eventually be thrown away. The spiral they briefly described will keep turning.

Artist Statement
I work with paper cups because they are the most honest material I know: made to be used, made to be discarded, made to mean nothing. When 17,767 of them rise together into a single spire, they stop being cups. They become a posture — the posture of a hand reaching upward. Even if that hand never touches a star, the act of reaching is what makes us human.