The Hawke's Bay Museums Trust collection holds a number of timepieces, some from as early as the 1700s. Photo / NZME
The Hawke's Bay Museums Trust collection holds a number of timepieces, some from as early as the 1700s. Photo / NZME
As the winter solstice approaches and we reach the shortest day, on Tuesday, June 21, we will have a greater awareness of time, our attention drawn to our connection with the world.
There's been a long history of marking time across the globe and in the Hawke's Bay Museums Trustcollection we hold a number of timepieces; some from as early as the 1700s. You can see many sketches and photographs depicting clocks, largely around Hawke's Bay, in our online collection. (https://collection.mtghawkesbay.com/explore)
None, however, speak to me personally as much as Ben Pearce's Great Grandfather Clock. Standing at nearly 2m high with legs that remind me of a Daniel Libeskind drawing, the finely detailed piece is evocative of a construct from another world, yet it borrows from our own, and here it is in all its physicality in our collection!
Pearce is a Hawke's Bay-based sculptor working with wood, stone, metal and found objects, slowly carving and assembling his work. He explores the nature of our interior worlds; how the experiences we've been through affect our memory and our perception of time.
Pearce won the Waikato Youth Award in 2009 for his work Great Grandfather Clock. MTG Hawke's Bay was lucky enough to exhibit it in a show titled Utterance the same year. The artist later noted this was the first piece that gained him national attention, which led to other shows.
In 2016, Jess Mio, curator of art at the time, proposed the trust purchase the work and noted it was "a departure from Pearce's formerly more abstract, chrysalis-like forms. Yet a sense of these unidentifiable creatures remains in the writhing forms and trumpet-like protrusions which engulf and invade the structure of the work ... Its haphazard, rickety structure - altered from its original form to the point of obscurity - could be seen to parallel the process of piecing together a picture of an unmet ancestor from stories, pictures and remnants of the past".
When asked to comment about the piece, Pearce responded: "I wanted to create a work that acknowledged my great-grandfather who was a clockmaker. As a child, these stories about this ancestor piqued my interest and I always thought about him whenever I saw a grandfather clock. The sculpture is not a direct representation of a clock, however, it is merged with a treehouse and purposely quite abstract."
I wonder how your ancestors, wherever they're from, marked or kept track of time. How do you acknowledge or observe the hours, days and weeks or maybe even years that pass? Tell our customer services team the next time you come to visit!
