Timekeeper in Residence

What does time look like to you? As soon as we try to picture time the irony is that we transform it into space, which means it's no longer time. What’s more, the images and objects we use to comprehend time shape our attitude to the past, our sense of what is to come, and perhaps even what it is to be human. 

A Storm is Blowing by artist-curator Cathy Haynes is an improvised 3D diagram that strings together 35 different historical pictures and models of time, some found (above) and some made for the installation. They include an ancient Egyptian game of life in the form of a coiled snake, a miniature multi-dimensional trapeze act, the future figured as a many-horned goat, a 5-metre chart of history as a stream, an astronomical wormhole, an 18th-century parent of the Facebook timeline, and its knotty antithesis. The installation is accompanied by A Report on Progress, a take-away booklet with text and drawings by Petrie’s Timekeeper.

This installation is part of a creative research project at The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, University College London. Supported with a new award from the Arts Humanities Research Council, artist-curator Cathy Haynes as Timekeeper in Residence has been exploring how time is mapped, measured, modeled and lived. Museums have traditionally used linear time concepts, such as chronological timelines, as a way of organizing their collections. Over the last few months this has been challenged in a series of public conversations between the Timekeeper as researcher and a variety of experts from astronomy to psychology, evolutionary genetics, theology, art history and philosophy. The project as a whole is a collaborative exploration of the alternatives to the museum timeline.

Visit astormisblowing.org for more details and podcasts from the Timekeeper events.

The timekeeper project

What does the museum timeline have to do with the novel Tristram Shandy? Why does Botox make time go faster? Is evolution really a march of progress? Why did the Ancients think the future is behind them? And why doesn’t the universe all tick to the same clock?

These are just some of the questions to be explored in a new creative research project at The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology based at University College London. Supported with a new award from the Arts Humanities Research Council, artist-curator Cathy Haynes as Timekeeper in Residence will explore how time is mapped, measured, modeled and lived. Museums have traditionally used linear time concepts, such as chronological timelines, as a way of organizing their collections. This will be challenged in a series of public conversations between the Timekeeper as researcher and a variety of experts from astronomy to psychology, evolutionary genetics, theology, art history and philosophy. 

Each conversation focuses on objects that give different experiences of time, from an ancient shadow clock in the Petrie’s collection to Facebook’s timeline format to a newspaper horoscope, encouraging debate on how competing time concepts can be used in museum presentation to present different philosophies, beliefs, realities and ideas. This in turn will challenge the way museums display their collections and offer new paths to explore.

Listen to an interview with artist-curator Cathy Haynes, Timekeeper in Residence, on The Monocle Weekly. 

Visit the A Storm Is Blowing website for more details and podcasts from the Timekeeper events.