‘Nomos’ is the Greek word for law, custom, or order. Ennomos derives from this root, meaning ‘within the law’ or ‘governed by order’. Its counterpart, anomos, describes those which exist outside or against law and order.

Across the works, materials behave outside of orders of conduct: soft substances take on the appearance of hardness, and vice versa, so it appears. Yet whilst the hard remains ennomos – its transformation surface-bound and temporal – the soft tends towards anomos. They metamorphose through accumulation of volume and mass into bodies of endurance, bending into an attitude of supplication.

Ennomos is also the name of the augur who is defeated by Achilles in The Iliad. In her essay ‘The Iliad, or The Poem of Force’, Simone Weil rejects the reading of the epic as a celebration of heroic triumph, instead identifying force and its petrifactive quality to reduce man into a thing as the central subject. As the equilibrium of force continually shifts, the hierarchy of strength and fragility become unstable. Permanence is only the facade, each refusing their assigned behaviour, transforming in relation to the other. Gradual changes mark the violence of time.