Good Fortune (in situ), 2023
Yellow vinyl sticker, 72cm diameter. Edition of 7.
Presented at CristelBallroomGallery, Amsterdam, 17-18 May, as part of Chop Chop.

In 1777, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe installed a peculiar sculpture in the garden of his Weimar home: ‘Agathe Tyche’, better known as ‘Stein des guten Glücks’ – the Stone of Good Fortune. A stone sphere balanced on a cube, the sculpture offered a distilled metaphor for life as Goethe saw it: not a linear path guided by reason, but a shifting interplay of stability and flux, gravity and momentum. The cube stood for moral virtue; the sphere for life’s unpredictable turns. In their precarious harmony, Goethe found a model for how to live – attuned, receptive, and never fully in control.

‘Good Fortune’ echoes the proportions and height of Goethe’s original composition, but reimagines it in pared-down, contemporary materials. A vivid yellow vinyl circle is placed directly on the wall, leaving only the hovering symbol of movement, uncertainty, and restless desire. The yellow evokes the cautionary stickers found on pharmaceutical packaging: a subtle cue to the realm of medicalised wellbeing, where diagnoses, prescriptions, and bureaucratic rituals promise care, but often leave us suspended in limbo.

While Goethe saw good fortune as a union of chance and agency, here it becomes more ambiguous. Is the circle rising or falling? Is it an emblem of hope or warning? In a system where access to healthcare can feel like a stroke of luck, and where recovery is never guaranteed, ‘Good Fortune’ questions the terms by which we understand care, diagnosis, and healing. How fortunate are we, when round pills provide partial relief but never a cure? When labels bring clarity but also enclosure?

The work situates itself within a broader inquiry: how can we rethink illness and vulnerability outside the logic of fate or failure? What if fortune is not bestowed, but constructed – fragile, shifting, and contingent on how we hold space for one another? Like Goethe’s sphere, we remain in motion. But without the cube beneath, we are asked to reconsider what, if anything, steadies us.