"What is presented here is a large upturned bottle of hand wash gradually disgorging its contents into another bottle—till one is full; the other empty. Simple. That’s all that happens.
The significance of this is in the context. It’s personal. And it’s beyond personal. It directly references the current pandemic that has already claimed five million lives worldwide and counting. But this hourglass construction possesses also private allusions in that it makes a direct reference to the artist’s father whose life gradually ebbed away recently. Thus the work operates at both an individual and universal level, which all the best art does.
I think it was McCahon who said that all the finest art had at its core the confrontation with mortality. Boreham does that here with a clever economy of means. As the hand wash slowly leaks out of its bottle it becomes transformed, by the artist, into a memento mori work, reminding the viewer of their own transience. The imaginative reuse of the apparatus is also what makes this piece so apt. The sheer banality of it. Conceptual art at its best. The ordinary becomes elevated to declare, unexpectedly and sometimes shockingly, truths about the human condition."
—Peter Dornauf, EyeContact, 2021
