1.

Three generations of the same sunflower specimen grown in the UK, cut and dried (including root and a flower-head bearing seeds) threaded aluminum bar & connecting hardware, piano wire, stainless steel eye bolts, steel fixings.

Time begins with the clock face - a circle subdivided, like land, into plots. Segments. Hours, minutes, seconds. Some early inventors of clocks experimented by tracking the movements of flowers, sunflowers were popular subjects because of their habit of ‘turning their heads to follow the sun’.

Productivity, yield, return: economic metaphors originating with the organic. Growth is measured nationally and economically but also in physical, emotional and even spiritual ways. Growing up is to progress isn’t it?

I had the idea on a depressing day in the garden last autumn (or fall, as you might say). The only things left standing in the gloom were the empty fruit nets and cages, stakes, canes and other rotten supports. I thought they could be made to say something about family; protection and restriction. ‘Support structures’ and safety nets.

I wanted to use growth as a process. To experience some of the jeopardy familiar to agriculture. I nurtured these sunflowers anxiously, looking at the seedlings in the cold frame thinking ‘is this my show?’. I worried about the weather; first for growing, sunlight hours, rain, wind. Then for drying; humidity, airflow, rodents, inevitably fungus. Finally, shipping; Plant Passports, seed sovereignty and seizure. The timeline of an exhibition seems brief, rushed in comparison to growing seasons. Suddenly a year isn’t long enough. The season also dictates how healthy and productive the crop is. Thick stalks could indicate a wet spring, a sunny summer. The weather echoes down the line. Which could be lyrics in a country song.¹

Native to North America, the sunflower seeds traveled with the bison across the plains lodged in their thick wooly coats.

So this has been a few years in the making. So what? ‘Rejecting the drive for newness’ I said on the gallery tour which I thought sounded quite clever, but maybe, understanding more how limited my resources might be, it’s just getting harder than ever to throw things away.

So much art is made quickly, with plastic, produced factory-like, on demand.

The compulsion to repeat, to reproduce. The self sowing of plants. Biological growth and the calendar. Body-clocks. ‘No heartbeat’ I wrote in my notebook with a simple pencil heart around it in the center of the page. I learnt the term ‘disenfranchised grief’ to describe sadness we are not allowed to express publicly such as miscarriages, pets or celebrity death.  

Repetition in relation to a certain model of family. And then maybe an ending. A break. The clock stopping, its spring released.

2.

Clock parts, museum case linings (cotton, vegetable dye) monofilament line, mounted on wooden panels.

The carriage clock was a traditional gift from employers to retiring or long-serving staff. However, in modern times, with changing work patterns and desires, this is much less the case. It feels like a form of Stockholm syndrome, to cherish a time-piece.

I imagined exploded clocks laid out like an anatomical dissection. Or maybe vivisection is more accurate - the process of cutting up something living. When you pull the clock spring out of the cylinder, the tension curls out, hissing like a small animal.

It is very relaxing to disassemble a clock. You take it from a compact, ticking instrument to a box of loose parts. To disassemble a factory clock feels like resistance, like the luddites taking their hammers, smashing the means of production. It’s called a ‘teardown’ in online jargon. You can watch videos of various things being torn down, mostly consumer electronics; iPhones, kettles. I think it models a desire to tear down bigger, less graspable mechanisms. To have power over them, to see what is inside.

The past touches the future. A touch from outer space. Making ends meet.²

What are you grinding for?³  Like it’s so special to have a job anyway. A confusing shame around the visibility of work-life as an artist.

In the mortuary the students inspect the condition of their cadaver’s body and ask each other what they think he did for work: ‘A farmer or a builder, maybe? Consider the size of his trapezius.’⁴

The clock parts are mounted on Ultra-V, a conservation grade textile produced in Europe for lining museum cases. It is coloured with vegetable dyes that are acid free, chemically stable and suitable for co-existence with fragile artifacts. After 21 consecutive days at work, unwrapping and re-wrapping cases, I wake up in the night with my fingers pinched tight, gripping the bed sheets as if they were fabric to be stretched.

When I rip the fabric off each panel I stuff it manically into a bin bag and hide it under the trestles to take home. At break I said something careless about ‘my real life’.
The site manager said “You think this isn’t your real life? You think this isn’t your real job don’t you?” He said “my job is to throw your work in the bin at the end of the exhibition.”
Everyone laughed, including me.
When I unpacked the material in the gallery last week, I saw my pencil marks, the holes from mounted objects. Time collapses. Like when you find an old receipt for something.

Art is just one activity, made in the spaces between other things. On your lunch break, on the train home, after other activities are finished, more productive ones.

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1. Deborah Evans Price: Matthew West Shares the Bittersweet Inspiration for New Song ‘18 Summers’ Woman’s World 25.04.24
2. Laura Langer on WhatsApp 2024
3. Nik Geene, Frankfurt am Main 2016
4. Naomi Pearce, residency notes, Teaching Mortuary, Dundee, Scotland 2019