After isolating the meaning that I wanted my second
exhibition piece to convey through dust collection, I started thinking about what form the piece could
take. I briefly considered using dust as
a base material for the product but quickly decided that that was a much larger
project in and of itself and may also detract from the physical act of
collecting dust.
I spent a long time debating if the dust collecting piece
was related enough to the LED Sundial for the two to be cohesively displayed
together. Though they are both about
time, and how we experience it, one is focused very much on the present and the
other on our progression from the present to the past. I also needed to think of an object to embed
the dust in to; something that would allow me to collect dust while also
resonating the message of time progression.
I decided to go back to basics and look again at timepieces.
One thing I have noticed about my own work methodology is
that if I get stuck, or end up going round in circles, I need to take a step
back. A big step back. Often all the way back to first
principles. It is there that my thoughts
become clearer and I can start to think laterally again.
During this investigation I hit upon the idea of using a
metronome.
A metronome is a unique timepiece in the sense that it
displays the progression of time, without having any way to record it. Unlike a clock, you see no progression of
numbers or dates, but you are constantly aware of the audible tick of the
pendulum driven mechanism. It is the definitive
timepiece for revealing the present; there is no record of the past within it
and no prediction of the future, only the now.
In this way, the metronome was the obvious choice for
pairing with dust collection – the metronome displays the present while the
dust, settling from our present environment, charts the progression to the
past. Keeping Time.
