John Waid - Everything Has Its Own Angle.

Everything Has Its Own Angle. John Waid (2026)

To investigate and promote the opportunities offered by this overlooked property, in 2020 I set up The Academy of Diverse Angles™. A range of precise angles where offered, documenting some iconic angular encounters, ten of which are featured here. Recipients were invited to find and document

The Perfect Angle. 

About me - my most recent piece of physical work was a twin text descriptor for the two main grass types at the Botanic Gardens in Dublin. All grass is green, but some grass is much greener than the other grass. Like most of what I do, this is patently obvious but I believe was worth translating into a fully realised outcome. Questioning and undermining the nature of the ordinary has been a focus of my work for ever since I realised that (for example) with a bit of effort a coathanger could become a fried egg, or at least in its dreams imagine that it had undergone this transformation. (if coathangers have dreams)

It’s never bothered me much that the connecting features of my work are usually just simple questions such as “why does a table have only four legs? which leads me to make a drawing of a table with five legs, one of which simply hangs there doing nothing, except stopping an inch short of reaching the floor. This thinking process is also fundamental in my practice as an educator, where I teach the participants in my workshops how to think in a different way that can take their work in unexpected and unpredictable directions. I was fortunate to be an educator at the NCAD (National College of Art and Design) in Dublin for 30+ years. This role has been extended via continuing creative workshops I run by invitation. It was questioning the ordinary and accepted that lead me to try and change the time zone in Ireland which has existed since 1916. This resulted in the creation of a piece of work titled “909,125 Minutes Later” which was shown at EVA 2016 and if you’re curious about that piece, a simple search will reveal all.

My attempt at changing the time zone is one example from an ongoing series of work under the general title of “Dubious Proposals Of An Easily Deniable Nature” such as trying to convince NASA to place a grand piano into a non-decaying orbit for astronauts to play. This is called “In Space No One Can Hear You Playing Chopin”. There are many more, such as proposing that the heads of the president’s at Mount Rushmore are hollowed out to become a bat sanctuary. These and many more proposals can be found randomly punctuating my Instagram posts. In addition to this work, I also generate (mostly) useless inventions and post many of them on the halfbakery.com website using a moniker for anonymity. To date there are 1700+ of these. I’m also interested in opposites, contradictions, dualities, and using humour/language to undermine or reinforce the obvious and the not so obvious.

None of this is ever created to go on gallery walls, but some of it has ended up there. I have no idea where it should go, but some of it is here now.