From Light to Dark From Dark to Light

My recent internationally toured installation Containing Time represented a step change in my work. It marked a shift from making individual ceramic vessels to exploring inter­locking ideas of time and place through sequential forms. The work secured British Council funding to exhibit at the 2018 Indian Ceramic Triennale and also a research visit to the Jantar Mantar – an eighteenth-century observatory in Jaipur used to track the sun and measure time with the world’s largest sundial. I was starting to think about a new project.

From Light to Dark From Dark to Light continues the durational theme from Containing Time but is a site-specific investigation of gradual change from the fixed point of my home and although begun three years ago resonates with the physical lockdown restrictions of a pandemic.  

‘On Earth, time is marked by the sun and moon, by rotations that distinguish day from night that had led to clocks and calendars. The present was a speck that kept blinking, brightening, and diminishing, something neither alive or dead. How long did it last? One second? Less? It was always in flux; in the time it took to consider it, it slipped away.’

- Jhumpa Lahiri "The Lowland"

Exploring the element of time led me to think about the rotation of the earth and its light-dark cycles. In 2017 I read an article about a team of American scientists, Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael Young, who won a Nobel Prize for their research into how molecular mechanisms control circadian rhythms – the twenty-four-hour body clock. I learnt how the light-dark cycle is at the core of life on our planet, controlling chronobiology that includes the circadian rhythms of humans, animals, and plants. Every aspect of being human – our physical, emotional and intellectual systems – is set by this cycle. It remains a constant beyond human meddling.