“Even in the eighteenth century, a Chinese reference book called Western clocks ‘simply intricate oddities, destined for the pleasure of the senses’, objects that ‘fulfil[led] no basic needs’.”

The Irish Museum of Time is housed in an old church in Waterford, Ireland. It’s filled with hundreds of timepieces, some dating back to the mid-sixteenth century. Many of the clocks are kept in working order and wound regularly, but not set to the same time, so the museum is filled with a chaotic symphony of ticking and chiming.

I first visited the museum in 2021 and was immediately enchanted by the space. It made such an impression on me that by the time we finished our visit, I had decided that one way or another, I was going to come back to make art there. I developed a fixation on time – as a concept, a physical force, a cultural phenomenon, an individual experience – and two years later, I finally made my way back to the museum to make art about it.

It ended up being somewhat of a guerilla residency; I arrived and announced myself as their artist in residence (much to their initial confusion) and proceeded to spend a month chatting to staff and volunteers, shooting rolls of film, and collecting guests’ responses to a worksheet I created, wherein I asked them to engage with the space and the question – what is time, anyway?

I concluded the residency not with any sort of definitive answer to this, but bolstered by new questions and a renewed appreciation for the variety of ways we engage with time, both as a concept and as a more concrete image, represented by the physicality of the time-pieces in the museum. This show recreates my experience of that space, and asks the viewer to assist in the continued growth of this collaborative work.