Hands of Time

#13 of my "Earth" series.

A piece about time.

Time feels so different these days. Quarantine. More than ever before I'm spending significant time in the backyard, especially because the weather has been quite nice and inviting, and also because there always is something to cut or weed or rake anyways. For example, every day I pick up those hundreds of sweetgum balls that keep falling onto the lawn. They look a lot like coronaviruses, by the way. Looking up the trees, I can expect many more weeks of daily collecting those sweetgum balls, and that's just fine with me. I like doing repetitive things like these. It's calming and has a cleansing quality to it.

Yes, the days seem to have extra hours. Strangely, I'm feeling that these extra hours are not my own time but that I am spending other people's lifetime. In a way, that's actually true. Our family is privileged, we are in a safe place still, we have a home, income, health. We are functioning still. I am grateful for that, and I am heartbroken for those who are not as fortunate. How can we save their time?

This piece is a combination of some lucky finds: The plague doctor comes from a 1940s "Building America" magazine, a special issue about the nation's health situation, and the rainbowish window is cut from a 70s elementary schoolbook. For the numbers I used old Bingo cards, and the aluminum hands I took from an owl-shaped clock that I had bought at a garage sale a few years ago because I loved its charm but then it wasn't working and ended up in my special box labeled "wooden things."

I started out with a completely different concept where I wanted the plague doctor to hold a fly swatter to fight an Earth that was looking like a huge coronavirus. I still like the concept a lot but it didn't work out compositionwise, at least not for this particular series. I like the final result much better than my original idea, and also find its message to be more on point: The doctor is putting the clock together - or maybe he is taking it apart. In both ways I find the clock hands to be quite perfect, as they look like swords. But still, the doctor is not really fighting with these unfit tools that he's got, not visibly. He seems to be figuring out how things work, a bit puzzled, the feet barely on the ground. Altogether I wanted to present the life-or-death scenario like a game show with some magical unicornish rainbow vibe. I think, it works.

"Hands of Time"
Mixed media: clippings from various vintage book sources and bingo cards, fly leaves, ink, aluminum clock hands, on the hardcover back of a 1960's LIFE World Library book, 8" x 11"