Time Piece
May 2007
20cm x 16cm x 8cm

Description
A mantelpiece wind-up clock, one leg broken and mended with sticking plaster. Wooden frame covered in fabric fragments, glass clock face in fine net. Lacy fabrics and stitches seem to grow out from the frame and creep like ivy across the clock face. Distinctive ticking sound.

Themes, Comments and Storylines
The inescapable, steady and continuous sound of clock time ticking. Rhythm, pattern, repetition of textile work. The infinite hours spend in the making of textiles. Textiles consuming time, but growing beyond and across chronological time when time is not followed, but made, arrested, remade through textile work, like in Penelope’s weaving. A different take on time management and the passing of time.

"During these two years in the cellar, his wife very slowly knitted a skirt, which she unravelled as soon as it was finished, only to start again.”

Herzberg, Wolfgang (1990), Ueberleben heisst Erinnern: Lebensgeschichten Deutscher Juden, Berlin, Aufbauverlag 1990, quoted in Leydesdorff, Selma, Passerini, Luisa &  Thompson, Paul (eds), Gender and Memory, International Yearbook of Oral History, Vol. IV, Oxford University Press 1996, p.204
 

“The dolls’ clothes were made over many years by my grandmother, first for me and then for my daughter. Not only are they beautifully made, but they are from dresses I and H. wore. Also they document Gran’s advancing year: the stitches become bigger and the styles simpler until the last piece she made.” (from my correspondence)

 

“When I was six I decided I was going to be an artist when I grew up. […] I've been described as a textile artist by a few folks and every time I hear that title it shocks me a little - how did that happen? Is it true? For whatever reason it has had me digging into my memory to find textile memories. How have textiles been a part of my life and what has been their influence? Following is a memory from my childhood.
 My Italian Grandmother lived with us off and on when I was a kid. She was a widow and mentally ill. I didn't understand it then and really don't now. […] She seemed to spend most her time in her room. I remember she liked to embroider, and she was embroidering a lot. One day my Mother handed me a plain white pillowcase […] and asked me to draw a design for Grandma to embroider. This was a very exciting project for me! I went back to the linen cupboard and picked out some of my Grandmother's older embroidered pillowcases to get an idea of what to do. […]I remember searching the house for a blue ballpoint pen, because embroidery designs were in blue. […] I remember one I was particularly proud of. […].I asked to see it when my Grandmother was finished, I remember my Mother bringing it out to me. I was shocked. My Grandmother had embroidered it in large stitches, not seemingly to follow the design at all, first a red patch of stitches then an orange patch, it looked like she just used up the thread of one color and went to another, not making leaves green or roses pink everything was red, then everything was orange then everything was green. Shock turned to anger internally I thought - "I spent hours on that design and she wrecked it!" and then almost immediately, I realized probably for the first time, how ill my Grandmother was. I had seen how well she had done the old pillowcases in our cupboard, beautiful pink and red roses on some, and fresh yellow daisies with orange centers on others [...] My mother still gave me things to draw on and I still enjoyed it, I made them simpler and didn't expect them to come out fancy from my Grandmother's hand.”

From: Kinship in Colour and Wool, March 2006

 

  “So the experience of time passing is sensed physically and subjectively through fabric as a form of transitional object that acts as a mediating tissue between the body and the external world.” (Attfield 2000:123)

Attfield, Judith (2000), Wild Things: The Material Cultures of Everyday Life, Berg, Oxford 2000

 

"Before clocks were invented, frustration had a different shape. Time then was not made of little pieces, of hours and minutes, needing to be saved and accounted for, but was like a huge cloud enveloping the earth, and humanity was waiting for it to clear. The past was a part of the present; individuals lived aurrounded, in their imagination, by their ancestors and their mythical heroes, who seemed as alive as themselves; they often did not know exactly how old they were, being more preoccupied with death than with time, which was only a music announcing  another life that would last forever." (Zeldin 1995:350)

 

Zeldin, Theodore, 1995. An intimate history of humanity. London: Minverva