09/02/2026
Still.Mine.
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”
This work is not about stability, but about tension.
It stages the paradox Milan Kundera called “the unbearable lightness of being” — which is weight that glows, and solidity that is rendered fragile.
Each form seems heavy, and yet its glow counters the heaviness, it’s restless, yet never resolved, NOR IS IT ever finished. The stones lean into each other like congealed liquid, like unspoken confessions during a
metamorphic period, their weight held in impossible suspension. They are boulders of light—soft as breath, dense as eternity. To some they seem stacked by accident, but to me they are an anthem of resistance —
the refusal to resolve into order, the courage to stay fluid inside the solid; but never suggesting chaos. Everything worth knowing lives in contradiction—how weight becomes light, how silence grows louder
than words, how a body can ache for freedom and still crave the security of its anchor. This sculpture is my reflection, or maybe even my disguise:
gravity’s prisoner, but glowing from the inside with the memory of stars.
“The unbearable lightness of being”pressed into stone, asking us whether we carry our burdens, or whether they carry us.
Still.Mine.
Clair van der Swan
Marble
12″ × 12″ × 14″h
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