I’ve just finished watering my orchid. I water it every Friday, just so I can remember, or it won’t survive. And every week, when I perform this small ritual, I am struck by how quickly another Friday has arrived when it feels like only a few days have passed, especially when each day, from morning till night, seems to hold so much time.
When I stop in front of the mirror in the morning, I can see by the length of my hair, how long a year is. And by the wrinkles deepening around my eyes, I know how long a decade is. The handwritten notes for this essay meander on the blank side of scrap paper whose opposite face records my ancestry back to 755 AD. In the past weeks I’ve been going through family photos and documents left in boxes after my mother died a few years ago and with each preceding generation there are fewer and fewer stories, photos and mementos.
Some of my earliest art included rubbings from an old brass clock face. After my father died two decades ago, I found an antique clock along with the sketches and calculations he had made while trying to restore it back to working condition. His time ran out before he completed the project and that clock, missing it’s time-telling hands and with gears that had stopped long ago, found a place in an art series about time, memory and ritual.
Days can seem so long. Weeks, short. Years are moments and decades slide by. A life-time is full of experiences to savour or endure, moments to reflect or act, with time to waste, plan, wait, or rush recklessly into beauty, adventure, love and the unknown without a second thought, into the kaleidoscopic array of possibility that presents itself each new day. Often enough, however, we wake up and take one step at a time towards evening, following a schedule or plan, bumped off course only momentarily by an unexpected phone call or interruption. And if we care to notice, a moment of grace, like sunlight splashing through a window and spilling across the floor at a break in the clouds. Or the unburdened voice of a child’s laughter.
With our experience of time so flexible in its elastic stretch and compression, so dependent on our limited perception, we have to be humbled. Our sense of time is too egocentric. We think we are at the centre of history. And in the same way that we see the ever widening circles around us marking us as the centre of our own universe, this moment now is experienced as the centre of our time. This moment is preceded by ever diminishing memories of earlier months and years and it is followed by detailed plans for coming weeks but intangible hopes for future years. We find ourselves at the centre of our here and now, almost incapable of seeing what has already been and what is yet to come. But in the humility of this knowledge of our tiny moment of now and here, we have to see that it still holds and marks a place in the ever expanding timeless universe.
What we can’t see, feel or understand yet, still exists. All that we don’t know from before still happened, and what is yet to come will still unfold whether we are here to know it or not. There is another person in his or her own here and now affected by my small turn of the kaleidoscope just as I have had my view shifted by those who nudge up against my here and now.
Paul Roorda, Apparatus for Learning to Step Lightly, kinetic sculpture (leg steps on scale after 5 hours), 2014.
I was trying to get at some of these ideas in my series of slow kinetic sculptures. In these works, slowly turning mechanical devices or the gradually shifting weight of water dripping from a flask created movements so minute that it took hours, days or weeks for the objects in the art to move even a small distance. The persistence of the mechanical ticking or water dripping was the only indication of the imperceptible movement of paper boats invisibly gliding across the floor, or of a wooden foot tapping without seeming to move, or of a day long turn of a page. It is an opportunity to remember that our perception is limited and this knowledge must inform how we act. Our actions have consequences far beyond this moment and those of our visible, immediate future.
As this art relates to climate, the speed of change is dramatically urgent: Records of receding glaciers, melting polar ice, rising sea levels, increases in severe weather events and the upward creep of average temperatures feel imperceptible in the moment, but it is shocking that even these changes can be experienced within a single lifetime. It shouldn’t be possible for one human generation to experience the type of global change that is typically recorded over the millennia of geological time.
Paul Roorda, Between Sea and Sky, kinetic sculpture (boats take 5 weeks to reach the glass domes), 2014.
This is why we can’t insulate ourselves in our own small here and now without looking beyond. This is why we can’t respond with ignorance or fatalism, or with the excuse that our time is too brief and our place too small to make a difference. We must, of course live in our here and now, but with the vision and understanding of what is beyond as well. We must each live our own moment in the awareness of its role in the unfolding of a bigger story.
So I will water my orchid again next Friday after another new week has hurtled by. And tomorrow I will wake to a sun that has been rising over the horizon almost forever. I will make a list with my plans for the day and even get to some of them. I will be interrupted by a flock of geese honking wildly as they launch into the sky from a thawing lake and be distracted by the rain as it falls against my window. I will waste time and daydream. I will work, make art, write, talk to friends and enjoy a meal shared in good company. I will remember something and dream of something else.
And I will know that while my here and now is a small moment, unseen by almost all, and certainly forgotten in time and with diminishing memory, it will have its own small consequence with its own tiny impact. And for that reason I will approach the hours of my day with humility and hope and a small but reassuring sense of purpose as I write my list and make my plans. As brief as it is, it will be a day with a million moments.
Paul Roorda, Long Wait for the Last Dance, kinetic sculpture (foot takes 24 hours to tap once), 2016
To see more kinetic sculptures, go to the Kinetic Sculpture gallery on my website.