CLOCKS

by Catsou Roberts, Director of Vital Arts, Barts Health NHS Trust

For his commission with Vital Arts, one of his first public works, Roger Hiorns sought items to subject to his signature crystallisation process. As part of his research for the project, Hiorns consulted the Chief Archivist at Barts Health NHS Trust, sifted through the Trust’s extensive museum collection, and scoured a condemned Edwardian building for suitable objects to incorporate into his artwork. While roaming the evacuated premises slated for demolition – redolent of the abandoned Mary Celeste – Hiorns alighted upon several clocks still ticking quietly in the darkness. These discarded clocks formed the basis of his installation for the new 15-storey building of the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. 
 
The series of clocks, encrusted in blue crystals, are distributed along a corridor leading to the operating theatres. There, the suspension of time, as encapsulated by the corroded clocks, is a critical factor in recovery. Although the dials are largely obscured (rendering unreliable the truism about a stopped clock being ‘correct twice a day’) these gleaming blue discs are identifiable as the time-keeping devices which regulate our days and dominate our lives. 
 
As such, they bring a raft of associations about time into the hospital, where duration can be particularly elastic. Waiting for a routine appointment might seem like a yawning chasm of time, yet, in a brief instant, a life can be irrevocably altered when a consultant delivers devastating news. 
 
Within a hospital context, clocks are especially resonant. For official documents, time is declared at both ends of life: the certification of birth and the formal confirmation of death. The first minutes of skin-to-skin contact in a maternity ward are as time-sensitive as the last lingering moments with the body of a loved one in the mortuary. 
 
With the advent of the railway, clocks became ubiquitous as a means to synchronise time, advance mechanisation, and promote efficiency. Now, of course, each battery-powered clock runs (and stops) at its own pace, eventually falling out of sync with others. Hospitals are filled with such clocks. Keeping track of time can help defer anxiety, and for dementia patients in particular, it can ease disorientation (spawning an industry of persistent clock-peddling). Most of the 8000+ rooms at the Royal London have at least one clock. Some rooms have three. Any one of them, accurate or not, crystallised or otherwise, might also serve as a memento mori – in due time. 

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