MOVEMENT residency:
Letty Noonan
20 January 2017 – 18th February 2017
“To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour”
– Augeries of Innocence by William Blake.
Networks in Time questions the way society perceives and moves through time. Questioning whether we are cognitively aware of our own cycles when in public, and how these patterns affect us as a network.
The train station of a connecting rail network. The inbetween place. Where notifications become over saturated with repetition of tannoy announcements, electronic departure/ arrival boards, printed timetables on boards and pamphlets, and mobile phone journey planners. We are overloaded with information over and over. Time becomes a waiting process. An impatientcountdown. Waiting for a connection whilst disconnecting. Time is measured by its future activities through an itinerary. A system created to benefit us through regularity and efficiency. But when things become inefficient we become agitated and restless. We huff. We tut. We depend on what we are used to expecting, and expectations disappoint us when things don’t go as planned.
But between all of that we forget our internal focus. Our present focus of our lives within time. Our surroundings. Time just ticks by. We become less aware of wasted time. Waiting for the future. But what if we were to become cognitively aware? What if each second were to sound like a pulse, a beat or an alarm? Would we become more aware of our actions? Would we do something else during our waiting period?
Constructed around and within Worcester Foregate Street Station during the residency’s beginning, Patterns and Codes explored the discovery of possibilities when taking the time to look closer. The compositions were a result of seeing the urban landscape from an abstract viewpoint, with a focus on urban objects that relate to our surroundings.
This exhibition stems from An Ode to Those Who Look:a piece that developed from Patterns and Codes. Installed into the station wall, the piece attempted to reject the overloaded notifications. Instead, rolled up pieces of blank paper, in an array of playful colours, amplified nooks in the walls that would go unnoticed by the majority of the public that frequent the platforms. The only prior signs of interaction, passengers disposing of insignificant receipts, chewing gum and food wrappers in the cracks. There are rubbish bins, but they’re ignored by these few in waiting. If we were less distracted with waiting, it could open up the possibility to awareness of all kinds of things.
Networks in Time relates to the public using a familiar object that is relied upon to get through daily life: the clock. But there is no countdown. Only a continuous forward motion of time in definite progress. As the grouping of clocks measure their way through the present, there is an overlapping and urgent ticking, illuminating each valuable second. This is a subjective response to the first four lines of William Blake’s Augeries of Innocence. A sensory metaphor using sounds and visuals for the feeling of not living in the present.
For other work and visuals of the work related to Networks in Time:
Website: www.lettynoonan.com
Contact: www.lettynoonan@hotmail.co.uk
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