Watches

This is a series of tiny sculptures which are built inside antique pocket watch cases. Many of them address time as a theme, but not linear time, so much as our experience of it: expansion or compression, nostalgia and memory, cycles and seasons. The watches also explore how we measure time: musical time, celestial time, arrested time, and the passage of time.

Working with objects which have textures, colors, and evidence of wear and history provides a unique richness, as does witnessing how the fragments impact each other. Viewing these sculptures is like looking through a glass into a miniature world where objects are having a private dialogue. Some of them have moving parts, the viewer is welcome to interact with the pieces to obscure or reveal different meanings, giving them a dynamism that cannot be conveyed by a still image.

* Probably worth a mention that most of these cases come from standard-issue watches given to early railroad conductors, and some of the backs are engraved with images of trains. Before the railroad, it was typical to have a local time that was different from town to town, but to avoid crashes, time was standardized, and for a while this was known as "railroad time." These cases themselves were a footnote in the history of our changing relationship to time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time

Watches are 2.5 inches in diameter.