The machine is open and it is not running.
A circle of steel plate, riveted at four points, with a round port cut into it. Inside the port, four iron vanes folded in toward the centre like the leaves of a shutter, and behind them a slot of pale green light coming from somewhere further in. Around the lower rim, blocks of rusted iron set at intervals, the teeth. Below all of it a shelf of concrete with the grease of many years worked into the surface.
Lying tipped into the mouth is a bottle. It is whole.
I went into that room expecting to paint destruction and there was none on offer. No glass on the floor. No spray of fragments, no white star of impact, not so much as a chip on the rim of the port. The bottle is intact from base to shoulder, dark, dull with the film that comes off a wash and dries wrong, and it is simply resting there in an open steel throat which is doing nothing whatever about it.
The direction is what I would ask you to look at. It has gone in base first. Its bottom is nearest you, taking the only strong light in the picture, and its neck is inside, in the dark, out of sight. Every other stage of that bottle’s existence ran the other way. It was blown from the base up. It was filled through the neck. It was emptied through the neck. Somebody’s mouth was on the neck. The machine will take it by the part nobody ever touched and leave the mouth for last.
I doubt this is deliberate. Bottles arriving down a chute land the way weight decides, and weight is in the base. But the whole of this cycle has been about processes that arrange things correctly for reasons that have nothing to do with what the things are, and here it is again, in steel, at the end of a belt.
What is not in this painting is a villain, and I say so because I know what a round hole with iron teeth looks like and I know what the word mouth is doing in the title. There is no appetite here. The port is not waiting. It is a shape that objects pass through, cut to a diameter by somebody who worked out the largest bottle the region sells and added a margin. The resemblance to a mouth is entirely our contribution. We are the ones who cannot look at a hole with teeth around it and see a hole.
I painted the four vanes with more attention than the bottle. They are worn bright along the leading edges from thousands of passes, and dull everywhere else, and the pattern of that wear is an exact record of the work, more accurate than any book kept in that building.
Nothing is happening in this picture. It is the last moment in which the bottle is a bottle, and it is completely quiet, and the light is on.