The Marches
2021-2025

Made in collaboration with horologist Greg Arp, The Marches deconstructs the infinite depths within Arp Clock and Wood Shop to better understand how humans attempt to construct and control the most artificial of our inventions. 

There's an old saying: “one never knows the time inside a clock shop.” Within this paradox, a dialectic emerges: Greg’s practice of repairing clocks restores duration, while my photographic practice suspends it. Time in this context is elusive, experiential, and relative.

Understanding the clock shop as a labyrinth-like archive of time, I see the diversity of forms and fragments within the space as a taxonomy of everything: schematics, drawings, newspaper clippings, family photos, broken clocks, books, tools, dust, flies, spiders, and other ephemera. Working with the archive, I utilize recovered detritus as source material for various photographic processes. Cyanotypes, gum bichromates, photograms, archival images, and found objects collide in serial, abstract constellations designed to emphasize the accumulation and entanglement of all matter within the space. Through this process of organizing and collecting, new relational configurations emerge—things recur but on another level; nothing is first, everything is new.

But after 18 months of collaboration, the tension between our practices changed when Greg died. Left to grapple with his absence, 
I photographed 4,024 objects found in the shop as a way to preserve his memory as the clock shop rapidly dissolved. By photographing objects on a neutral background, each object is liberated from the everyday function of the clock shop and placed in shifting relations to each other, forming a comprehensive list-form inventory.

My eclectic process strives to mirror the polymathic nature of Greg’s, where different hats are worn and the refutation of obsolescence resists the authority of time. By mirroring and complicating the diverse methods of clockmaking and repair, I’ve come to recognize the clock shop as a photographic labyrinth of time, memory, and absence.