Telling Time: A Clay-Based Project

This project started as an experiment with the human interpretation of time and posterity. Being interested in the concept of deep time – of the geological timeframe that spans roughly 4,6 billion years – I approached this project as a space for contemplating temporalities that lie outside or in excess of human time.

As Robert Macfarlane holds, the concept of deep time asks us to question the very category of ‘the human’ in the face of “the planet’s cycles of erosion and repair” or when “viewed from the perspective of a desert or an ocean” (Underland 2019). For Macfarlane, deep time offers a radical (though equally useful) perspective on our troubled relationship with our ecosystem, “for to think in deep time can be a means not of escaping our troubled present, but rather of re-imagining it; countermanding its quick greeds and furies with older, slower stories of making and unmaking… bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us.”  

I decided to use a road trip through Namibia, my country of birth, as a platform for launching this project. Stopping along the way wherever the environment moved me or I felt compelled to do so, I would wander into the landscape with a sculpture tucked under my arm or stowed in a rucksack. I’d explore my surroundings with no clear intention other than finding a possible resting space for a piece – a place where it can be left behind and where its new life can start. These spaces were strategically selected for their unique connection to and characterisation of geological time, as well as their isolation. The chance of these pieces ever being found again by another human, albeit in their current state or position, is very, very slim. No one else knows where these sculptures rest – it is a knowledge only the landscape and I carry. 

Once they are placed in the landscape, processes of erosion and wear inevitably set in, with water and wind gradually eating away at the pieces. Bit by bit, ever so slowly, these earthenware sculptures will give themselves up to their environment in ways they would not have done elsewhere – be it in a gallery, museum or at home. From this moment on, their existence as sculptures can be anything from years to decades; some might even see in a new century. Whatever the case might be, these pieces will be shaped by and become part of the same rock cycles that carved their way into the stones and riverbeds within which they find themselves. With time, these ceramic pieces will become dust once more. 

I see each of these as unique emplacements - a term I borrow from geology. Emplacement refers to the process or state of setting something in place, and it is concerned with how rocks came to exist in their current position and location. I find this apt in the context of my own work, where I’m thinking about and playing with some of these associations, albeit in a more open-ended manner.