Balancing Act: Sisyphus & Doing Your Dishes

Adornments, Words and Photography by Zachary Leachman

Nietzsche referred to artists as “burnt children” & their commitment to art being representative of the degree to which life had been spoiled for them:

“Now and then, in philosophers or artists, one finds a passionate and exaggerated worship of ‘pure forms’: no one should doubt that a person who so needs the surface must once have made an unfortunate grab underneath it. Perhaps these burnt children, the born artists who find their only joy in trying to falsify life’s images (as if taking protracted revenge against it-), perhaps they may even belong to a hierarchy: we could tell the degree to which they are sick of life by how much they wish to see its image adulterated, diluted, transcendentalized, apotheosized- we could count the homines religiosi among the artists, as their highest class.”

Life, in many ways, has been spoiled by modernity to such a degree that we have yet to reconcile it, but we can feel something is amiss. Sometimes it feels as though we artists are still trying to become God, to create God, despite overwhelming evidence that it’s a futile pursuit. There’s some Sisyphean beauty in there somewhere, right? The boulder is a metaphor for life itself, but it might be a more optimistic take than one might glean at first glance. Pushing a boulder up a hill for eternity, doing your dishes when they’re in the sink, saying the hard thing, showing up for therapy: at all these points of tension, we create meaning, we deepen our story, we create the future for ourselves.

We are on a chunk of rock, hurdling around a ball of fire, flying through an expanse of growing nothingness - for no conceivable reason - & yet it still matters to us that we haven’t heard from that one friend in a long time. It still matters that we never learned to play piano. We evade planetary catastrophe on a daily basis, we will all die someday, & so will everyone we know, but we have a tiny pin-prick of influence in our own lives. Despite overwhelming evidence that none of this matters at all, it still matters to us. It might be the case that actually, everything matters - precisely because it is so futile.

In my practice, making things can feel incredibly repetitive & tedious. I often ask myself “what’s the point, why don’t I get a real job, do something useful for a change?” Maybe someday. In the meantime, this practice has taught me a considerable amount of patience. the way I cast is finicky, tedious, & as much as I don’t like the implications of the word: primitive, for the time being. I was trained by no one, I answer to no one, I have to be the force that motivates myself to make the next thing. Sometimes I don’t want to. Sometimes I’d rather do nothing at all (& sometimes I do). However, though the process may feel a lot like pushing a boulder up a hill, I’m always glad after it’s done. It’s some form of cyclical affirmation, a rare opportunity to experience the abstract becoming the concrete, one of the only avenues in my life that produces a tangible result I can feel proud of. In that respect, I really enjoy making these things, even though there are points in the process that make me want to tear my hair out.

Luckily for you, you can purchase my vain attempts to offload my existential pain & wear them.

You can find Zachary’s work on symadornments.com and on instagram @sym_adornments