The Catalogue Essay for Stillness in Orbit: The Slow Modernities of Ellinor Cade

Dr. Penelope Voss, Reader in Temporal Aesthetics, University of Lowestoft

“We do not dwell in time as much as we loiter beside it, occasionally brushing the hem of its garment.”

— Ellinor Cade, notebook fragment, undated

To approach the work of Ellinor Cade is to enter an architecture of deceleration—a perceptual corridor where the modernist impulse to propel forward is reversed, turned inside out, and folded gently over itself like soft paper. For five decades, Cade has devoted herself to the study and expression of what she calls “slowed agencies”: phenomena that resist urgency, elude spectacle, and enact duration as a form of defiance.

Her work belongs to no school. It resembles the output of no other artist. While she was once loosely affiliated with the Anodic Materialists (an obscure Essex collective devoted to “non-conductive sculpture”), Cade has consistently eluded categorisation. Her practice occupies a unique interstice between kinetic minimalism, speculative astronomy, and what I have elsewhere termed chronoscepticism—the aesthetic suspicion of time’s supposed direction.

I. On Motion Without Movement

In Stillness in Orbit, Cade draws us into the cosmology of the barely perceptible. The title itself encapsulates a contradiction: to orbit is to be in constant motion, yet stillness implies an ontological fixity. Cade thrives in such contradictions.

Consider Satellite I: Holding Pattern (1994), a suspended bronze sculpture that rotates imperceptibly via ambient air currents generated by visitors’ breath. The piece, though tethered to Newtonian logic, refuses spectacle. It is not so much “seen” as it is gradually understood. One curator described it as “the sensation of watching something change while being unsure it ever has.”

This is Cade at her most assertive: unhurried, quiet, unbending.

II. The Liturgy of Dust

Dust, for Cade, is not detritus but data—evidence of time’s sedimentary drift. Her series Chrono-Palinopsia (2008–2012), comprises photographs taken at three-month intervals of a single empty shelf in her garden shed. Presented in a 6-metre row of grey matte prints, the piece is a slow cinema of accumulation.

Cade writes: “Dust refuses to perform. It cannot be posed, sculpted, or rushed. It is the patron saint of neglected surfaces and undervalued minutes.”

In a world addicted to velocity, her work demands a contemplative stamina bordering on the monastic.

III. Lamps, Moths, and the Gravity of Small Things

Perhaps the most psychologically resonant installation in this exhibition is Aphelion Interior (with Moth) (1999), a 12-minute video showing a single moth endlessly circling a chandelier in a disused Georgian laundry. Filmed in real time with no cuts and projected at 70% speed, the video creates a temporal vertigo—an exquisite visual tic that recasts the insect not as pest, but as pilgrim.

In Cade’s work, the humble moth becomes a metaphor for persistence without progress. “To circle,” she reminds us, “is not to err. It is to rehearse belonging.”

The setting of the laundry—a space of former cleansing, now abandoned—functions as what Gaston Bachelard might call a “poetic ruin.” Here, architectural decay serves not as backdrop but as collaborator.

IV. Resistance Through Retardation

Cade’s practice has, since the 1970s, articulated a political subtlety often overlooked in contemporary criticism. In her early “walkworks” (now sadly lost to entropy and budget cuts), she recorded herself walking backwards through train stations, mimicking the flow of the crowd while moving against it. It was, she said, “a kind of protest against chronological coercion.”

Her resistance is never polemic. It is gravitational. She slows the world not through confrontation, but through the invitation to linger.

V. The Orbits We Choose

The exhibition’s final piece, Lagrange Body (Waiting for Collapse) (2025), was created specifically for this retrospective. It consists of a delicate mobile made of mirrored acrylic, rust, and fragments of discarded notebook paper, suspended inside a glass column that visitors may enter one at a time. The structure is lit by solar fluctuations, making its cast shadows shift unpredictably throughout the day.

On one scrap of paper, placed deliberately just out of reach, Cade has handwritten: It is not the moving that matters. It is the manner of being held.

This final gesture encapsulates the emotional freight of her work. What appears passive is not inert. What seems still is orbiting.

Conclusion

To encounter Ellinor Cade’s practice is to be reminded of one’s own breathing, of the friction of dust beneath fingertips, of the unknowable distances between a hand and a shadow. Her work insists on temporal reconfiguration—not a rebellion against time, but a reconciliation with its gentler dimensions.

In an age continually subjected to velocity and performative attention, Stillness in Orbit offers something far more subversive: an aesthetic of endurance, humility, and durational grace.

It is not work that shouts. It listens, and it invites us—if only briefly—to do the same.

Dr. Penelope Voss

Reader in Temporal Aesthetics

University of Lowestoft

Author of The Slow Sublime: Time and the Unhurried Eye (Grendel & Clyne, 2022)