Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
    —Samuel Taylor Coleridge


alone (adj., adv.)
“unaccompanied, solitary; without companions,” c. 1300, a contraction of all ane, from Old English all ana “unaccompanied, all by oneself,” literally “wholly oneself,” from all “all, wholly” (see all) + an “one” (see one). It preserves the old pronunciation of one.

Similar compounds are found in German (allein) and Dutch (alleen). The sense of “and nothing else” is from c. 1200, as in “Man does not live by bread alone” (Matthew iv.4, KJV; there Tyndale has “man shall not lyve by brede onlye”). Related: Aloneness. Adverbial alonely seems to have become obsolete 17c.


This exhibition examines the relationship between connection and withdrawal, and the mix of distance and immediacy that structures contemporary living. Loneliness has become ambient rather than exceptional. Life is shaped by numbing connectivity, terminally online habits, and the accelerating drift toward isolation even within spaces and platforms (nominally) designed for togetherness. Desire both sharpens and stalls as communication is filtered through avatars and algorithms promising intimacy while reinforcing its scarcity; closeness has become a provisional state, felt more as anticipation than encounter.