.....what if I decide not to have children and then later realise that it was the wrong decision but by then it’s too late as I’m too old and can’t have children any more and what if I’m at a party and I get suddenly shy and can’t talk any more and the other people think it’s because I’m arrogant and unfriendly and afterwards I just feel stupid and as if I’ll never be able to have a conversation with anyone ever again and what if I’ve arranged to meet someone and I wait and wait and they don’t come and I don’t know if I should keep waiting or if they’ve forgotten or maybe had an accident or maybe intentionally not come because they just don’t like me and what if someone buys some uranium and builds a nuclear bomb because I’ve heard it’s really easy to buy uranium in the former Soviet Union and if someone does that and wants to start a nuclear war then there’s nothing we can do about it and if that happened would I be brave or would I behave really badly and what if all the rain forests get destroyed and because of the greenhouse effect the world gets hotter and hotter and the ice caps melt and the sea-level rises until we just can’t survive any more and what if I’m driving a car and I make a mistake and I cause an accident and even kill someone and what if I’m crossing the road and a car’s coming and I just don’t see it and I get run over and what if I decide to go out at night and I end up not having any fun and I just end up feeling bored and sad and I spend more money than I’ve got and I drink too much and I sleep in the next morning and feel really bad but what if I decide to stay at home and I end up getting lonely and then the next day I hear that everyone else had fun without me and what if my flatmate decides that she doesn’t like me any more and so I have to find another flat but I can’t find one and what if the landlord throws us both out and we can’t do anything about it and what if I live with someone who never cleans the bath and when I complain about it just gets angry and I have to keep on cleaning the bath myself because I can’t stand it when the bath is dirty but I just get more and more furious about it but can’t say anything and what if the person I live with also keeps stealing my food even though I try and hide it in cupboards where they never normally look or at the back of the fridge and it’s always the food that’s nicest and most expensive and when I tell them to stop they just deny that they’ve ever taken it in the first place and what if I get one of those strange immune system diseases where you’re just tired all the time and can’t really do anything but there’s no cure and everyone thinks that you’re malingering because you can’t prove that you’re ill and what if there’s just no commonality between people and we’re all just fundamentally alone and what if I’m walking along the road and I see a huge dog on the pavement and it starts growling and coming towards me and although I know I shouldn’t run away because it will just chase me I can’t stop myself and what if I have a relationship with someone who starts being really horrible to me but I can’t leave them because I’m too scared to be on my own and what if .....

A translation of part of the German text.

Worry #1, Kunstverein Kreis Gütersloh, 1997

Worry was installed in all 27 windows of the Kunstverein. The text was printed onto strips of self-adhesive transparent film and attached as a continual text loop on all four sides of the space between the double windows. The work only became visible when the visitor looked through the window. The text had no beginning or end. A different part of the endless worry ran through each window.

Worry #2, Public art project, Stadtkunst, Bonn 2002

Worry was written with marker pen directly onto the louvre windows in a glass bridge joining two buildings of a department store.