Felicific Bar
Liadin Cooke 2011

Felicific Bar is a work about defining and assessing the movement between different states of emotion, the brass pole or bar both stops and props up while its height and weight hints at danger and uncertainty.

Brass, unlike bronze, has a domestic sensibility invested, through polishing and handling, with a sense of architecture and the manufacture of cheap ornaments, while the green, claggy mass of wax has a congealed ordinariness that obliquely hints at some type of chemical reaction.

This is a work of opposites - delicate and robust, tall and very slender. Is it a barrier or is it something to protect, is it a stick to beat you with or is it something to nurture? Leaning against the wall it has a transitory precarious feel, as though on its way somewhere about to affect something, or perhaps it is waiting to be a pivot between an action and its consequence.

Jeremy Bentham devised the felicific calculus as a procedure for establishing the moral status of actions, whereby one could attempt to work out the likely consequences of an action in terms of the pleasure or pain of those affected by that action.