Link: The Human Clock
The concept of time has always fascinated me since I was a child. I always wondered who decided when to start counting time, what made them worthy enough to do so, how we came to know seconds, minutes, weeks, and months. Days and years were concepts that made slightly more sense to me since we base those off of planetary systems, but time itself seemed to be something so intangible and fluid that it would be silly for humans to try and categorize it. Yet for centuries we’ve followed the same arbitrary standards. There are time zones and leap years and daylight savings periods. There are historical records of a point when the sun never moved in the sky for hours. After all these years I’m still not fully confident in standard time. Time and its measurement varies in different cultures and it seems backward for everyone to follow the same time tracking methods. To me time is something personal and individual, it’s reflected in our minds, our gaining of wisdom, our physical features, and our memories. Time is kept naturally by the body and the spirit. The rhythmic beating of a heart that changes tempo. The graying and loss of hair. Deterioration in eyesight. Growth and loss and growth again of teeth. The emergence of lines and wrinkles. The rise and fall of our heights. As babies we know nothing, then we gain knowledge and experience with age, which manifest in our features as we get toward the latter stages of life. We humans are clocks with the ability to adapt to change. This is why I chose the body to represent The Clock. Aging is something beautiful, which I also fear, thus this project had a lot of emotional meaning to me. It allowed me to ponder this inescapable fate and see it in a new light.