In art, there's the time it takes to create an object, be it a painting, weaving, sculpture, or musical composition. When the process is running smoothly, it's as though time disappears.
Rossbach looks at the time involved in a creative activity through a particular lens. While he specifically addresses basketry, his perspective could just as easily apply to working with cloth and thread or canvas and paint. He suggests understanding basketmaking as more like music than a visual art:
...more of a time experience than a space experience...an experience in dividing and organizing time, breaking time into modular units...more complex than minutes and seconds, to be arranged in sequences and patterns. Basketmaking might be a sort of clock, not a measuring device, but something devised by [wo]man to enforce an awareness, a savoring, of time through its arbitrary division into rhythmic units.
Time reminds me of Alice shrinking or growing larger as circumstances change in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Sometimes, it feels as though time is diminishing--there's too little of it to meet a deadline--and, at other times, it feels as though it's stretching interminably, as we wait impatiently to see a doctor. |
If truth is that which lasts, then art has proved truer than any other human endeavour. What is certain is that pictures and poetry and music are not only marks in time but marks through time, of their own time and ours, not antique or historical, but living as they ever did, exuberantly, untired.
Textile artist Cynthia Corbin's wall hanging "Marking Time" seems to visually capture Winterson's thoughts.
How do you think of time? How does it play a role in your creativity?
Which artworks convey a sense of time? What are the ways in which an artist can represent time?
What artwork has a timeless quality for you?