An Iconography of Time and Space
After painting abstractly for 20 years, in 1999 I began to create assemblage in wood boxes. My concerns centered around how we orient ourselves in the world and in the universe. Other questions emerged as I explored this new approach to art. How do diverse elements coalesce in a single moment? What is the iconography of time, deep space, and our orientation in these elements? In scrutinizing the multiple ways in which we order and position our lives, what informs us about our spiritual and physical location?
Because my focus was centered on time and timing I found that the resulting box frequently looked like a clock. At this juncture it occurred to me that perhaps if I worked in antique clock cases it would amplify the time nexus in a more powerfully visual way. Initially I worked in smaller mantle clocks but as my sense of space, scale and proportion expanded I found myself drawn to ever larger cases.
All the 2005-2006 work was created in antique clock cases. Essentially they are framed by time. My allusions to time are reinforced by the elements I've used within each piece, pendulums, dials, gongs, movements etc. To further delineate our navigation through space and time I've employed compasses, protractors, astrolabe pieces and astrolabe designs. Our ongoing need to make concrete ephemeral notions such as time by trying to measure it, plot it out, make it mathematically specific is an idea I explore again and again. We are all caught up in the dance of balancing the tangible with the intangible in our lives. Because serendipity is an essential part of any discussion on time I've addressed this with my use of game pieces, checkerboards, dominoes, and others.
Our perspectives on time are illuminated by our language. Phrases such as doing time, keeping time, time to kill, time on one's hands, time of sorrow, time bomb in addition to words such as timeworn, timely, timeless, timepiece, timetable, timespan and space-time apply to a complexity of concepts that span a spectrum of thought from physics to music and beyond. This vocabulary of time is a world of ideas with no end in sight.
My investigation continues.