The Marches

Made in collaboration with horologist Greg Arp, The Marches deconstructs the infinite depths within Arp Clock and Wood Shop to better understand how humans attempt to construct and control the most artificial of all our inventions: Time.

Inside Arp Clock and Wood Shop, time accumulates like layers of dust, or time, Barthes wrote, is like a spiral: "things recur but on another level, nothing is first, but everything is new."

Working entirely within the constraints of the clock shop, I utilize recovered and recycled detritus as source material for various photographic processes. Cyanotypes, gum bichromates, photograms, archival images, and digital and film techniques collide in serial, abstract constellations designed to emphasize the accumulation and entanglement of all matter within the space.

Understanding the clock shop as a labyrinth-like archive of time, I see the diversity of forms and fragments within the space as a taxonomy of everything: schematics, drawings, newspaper clippings, family photos, broken clocks, wood, copper, glass, books, tools, machinery, dust, cobwebs, flies, spiders, and other ephemera. Repetition and difference serve as guiding threads, pointing to our society’s cycle of production and consumption, where novelty and obsolescence collide. Within this ephemera, constellations of new works emerge, echoing the past lives embedded in the materials.

After 18 months of collaboration, Greg died unexpectedly. Left to grapple with his absence, I photographed 4,024 objects found in the shop as a way to preserve the memory of Greg as the clock shop rapidly dissolved. By photographing objects on a neutral background, each object is liberated from the everyday function of the clock shop and placed in shifting relations to each other, forming a comprehensive list-form inventory. 

My eclectic process strives to mirror the polymathic nature of Greg’s—where different hats are worn, and the refutation of obsolescence resists the authority of time. By mirroring and complicating the diverse methods of clockmaking and repair, I’ve come to recognize the clock shop as a photographic labyrinth of time, memory, and absence.