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Tim Skinner

London
Questioning Newtonian time and exploring depression during lockdown
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As the virus storm turned into a blizzard we all sheltered, we holed-up, we waited it out. An eerie crisp dawn beckoned, a raw dark event horizon, spawning fresh ‘pre’ and ‘post’ dual parlances; pre-covid, post-covid; pre-lockdown, post- lockdown. As confinement continued to rumble, the ‘pre-covid’ or ‘pre-lockdown’ discourses faded, submerged in a dense fog - a strange bizarre sensation of feeling like the events of a month ago actually occurred many years ago. Time was behaving obtusely, our new cave-dwelling internment was crystallising our inter-relationship with structured time. The suppressive, coercive weekly linguistic loop (days of the week) mutated, becoming irrelevant, null-and-void, obsolete. Certainly from my own perspective from the outset every day radiated that melancholic, dreary Monday feeling, the week refusing to splutter into motion. Constant exposure to bleak global news helped to commission, to certify, to authorise one’s own dark thoughts. Dwelling on one’s own mortality became step one in the book of how to deal with a pandemic; reviewing ones own life was step two. Whilst listening to Robert Macfarlane’s Underland (via audiobook) a line ironically glows brightly, “Here in the shadows, space and time spill into one another”. When normal life is interrupted and paused, time’s choir sings an array of diverse pulses, without rhythm, and we can start to listen to time’s true identity.

Pre-lockdown my work had been drenched for years in dialogues surrounding repetition. I was fascinated with multi-layered aesthetics and mesmeric semantic-satiation, but through the bleakness of my fresh reality, repetition would be stripped back to its underlying component flow, ‘time’. My aesthetic focus shifted to interrogating that interplay between constructed time used to govern our existence (which I would dub as ‘anthropomorphised time’) and the poetic breathing complexities of organic time; mechanic versus organic.

 

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