Most viewers are confounded by it. They ponder, are interested for a few seconds, then get restless and quickly move on, asking ‘What was that about?!’. Perhaps what installation art hopes to achieve is the reverence for the mundane, the ordinarily meaningless, the vacuum which one has to fill with your own imagination. The monks that are most senior get the most mundane tasks in the monastery. Like a haiku poem, installation art wants us to stop and look at something that we would ordinarily just pass by. I participated in a group art exhibition at 3rd i Gallery, De Waterkant, Cape Town, for the theme Energy and Motion. The work I created was a collaboration with clothing designer Peter Pitt. It showed from November 2007 to February 2008. The piece rested on an intertextuality between hand-made skirts for men and a book by Stephen Hawking called The Universe in a Nutshell, published by Random House. The artwork is, in a sense, a book review. In another sense, it is a display of the cognitive processes of learning, including knowledge acquisition (or rote memory), comprehension, application, synthesis, and judgement. In essence, the work showed how humans learn effectively via playful and personal paradigms. Photos of the unembroidered skirts were taken by Natalie Payne.