Conrad Shawcross: Timepiece, Roundhouse - exhibition review
For the next three weeks, the hubbub you might be familiar with in the Roundhouse is hushed. The venue has become cathedral-like, plunged into near darkness. The only light comes from the small but blinding bulbs on three arms which are moved at different speeds and with balletic rhythm by a vast, metal machine hanging from the roof.
Below it is a four-metre high gnomon, the pointed needle of a sundial. Shadows play everywhere you look, from columns, the gnomon and the machine itself — whirling, lengthening and contracting as the arms move. Conrad Shawcross’s ambitious new work is called Timepiece, suggesting a rigid order, but at first it seems chaotic.
Slowly, its logic reveals itself. Shawcross noticed that the Roundhouse has 24 columns, and could become a form of clockface. The three arms mark the hours, minutes and seconds and tell the time accurately, but each is made of three parts, two of which turn clockwise, the other anti-clockwise, and at varying speeds, all in proportions of the number 12.
The point Shawcross is making here is that we have imposed our time-telling on nature. By breaking it down, he seeks to turn the rationality of the 24-hour clock in on itself, and evoke the celestial mysteries of time in earlier epochs.
It’s essential that you spend time with the work, follow the machine’s rhythms and enjoy the shadow-play around the space. Although everything is based on a scientific order, Shawcross’s creation has a hypnotic poetry.
Until August 25 (0844 482 8008, roundhouse.org.uk)
