Time and
Memory...
Here’s a rather lovely piece by young artist Samatha
Danckwerts. Check out her tumblr page here..
http://samantha-danckwerts.tumblr.com/
I was attracted to it straight away because a few days
before I saw it I had been formulating a plan for a QoE Creative event based on
memory and time.
I saw it at a show of Portsmouth University students work
the other night and as you can see it is comprised of many different time
pieces. My apologies for the poor photo but I only had a mobile camera phone
with me and this photo in no way does the beauty of the piece justice. I
believe it got sold that night to a certain famous Portsmouth based steampunk
antiques dealer and he’s a lucky fellow! It is replete with meaning and has
great substance and sensation. If you could walk around it you would sense that
despite its apparent fragility it has both solidity and sensuality. I haven’t
asked Sammy this but I have a feeling that this is a gendered artwork. The
notion that time can be gendered according to personal experience is deeply
interesting to me. I am not going to discuss this now because I haven’t yet fully
formulated my response to Sammy’s artwork in this way, but I feel that there
may well be a Part 2 to this blog post!! For the moment I want to view time as
a fluid vehicle that can be so personal that it defies the international standards
of time as an internationally recognised dimension.
My Dad has vascular dementia so for me this artwork has a
deep personal resonance. He can remember certain things and stretches of
decades but some decades and some people are forever lost to him. As we get
older our sense of time passing increases but with Dad his sense of time has
become fluid. He is stuck in a bubble of time which can change from day to day.
His bubble is circular but distorts on an irregular basis. One of the problems
of time is that it has an inherently circular structure. We can draw a from a
line from A to Z to describe the lifetime of a person on a chart, but the
concept of time as a dimension is difficult to describe without thinking in
terms of an evolving cycle or in terms of reasoning by circularity. I was
thinking about this when I was looking at Sammy’s artwork because her piece is
most certainly not circular. We can see that it is the shape of a torso, a
person built of the components of time. I liked the idea when I was viewing it
that I was actually looking at the different experiences in time of a person’s
life and that each cog, wheel and spring was a metaphor for specific events; a
car crash, getting a new job, the death of a loved one, even just simply
boiling an egg for breakfast! We all hold memories which are explicitly linked
to time and key events in particular places. These things make us what we are.
What happens when a spring or cog fails and drops out of kilter with other
experiences? What significance do the other memories then have to the person? Are
the remaining memories heightened or diminished by the loss of the springs and
dials that have fallen from the body? What is left of us when all the cogs have
fallen to the floor and the hand on the clock has slipped too far forward?
I’m going to write more about this on here, preferably when Sammy
tells me if I’m right about this artwork being gendered as then I will have a
lot to say about it. If I'm wrong I will still have a lot to say! It’s a clever piece. I want QoE to run an art event based
around notions of time and memory. Stay tuned as I develop this idea...
