In October 2024 I took up a Visiting Research Fellowship in Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford, with the aim to create an artist book based on research I’d be conducting using the University’s resources. Circles of Time is the result: a boxed set of three entirely handmade volumes taking us through the systems for marking circular time which humanity devised by observing both celestial and earthly cycles.

The books are now part of the College’s special collections, where they will join the very astrolabes that were used, 700 years ago, to create some of the almanacs I studied for my project…

General Notes

One of the questions I asked upon embarking on this research was, “To what extent are our apparently arbitrary ways of dividing time, actually reflections of a cosmic order?”

What I found was that time reckoning is completely rooted in deep and sustained observation of both earth and heavens, in intimacy both with the cyclically changing land and the steadily revolving cosmic bodies. In all our devices to keep track of these circles of time, there’s a tension between our links to a patch of soil  and our place in the stars, that has defeated all attempts to reduce it to a “universal” arithmetic—poetically so, as it reflects the paradox of our own human nature, both physical animal and spiritual being.

This double nature expresses itself in this book, where we travel constantly from the earthy and figurative to the abstract and conceptual. Some of this earthiness come through the natural materials it’s made of: paper, silk, mineral pigments, botanical inks and dyes, which I describe in more detail in the final section below. The abstraction manifest among other things in the use of (mostly unfamiliar) numbers and (mostly Kufi) script. My artist books are usually devoid of text because reading gets in the way of the experience; I want people to really look at the work, deploy their senses and imagination to tease out a story, rather than switch to reading mode. However, the presence of text signifies the presence of meaning, and this adds an extra dimension I find desirable. So I use text that most people cannot read, introducing meaning that is just out of reach—in other words, mystery.

Unboxing

Not shown in the video is the box in which the three volumes are lodged. The volumes are three because there is no single correct order to read them: Solar, Lunar and Planetary time can be picked up in any sequence (though my own preferred sequence is apparent when I speak about them).

The first thing you see when you open the box is an ammonite. This fossilised spiral features here as a symbol of Time: the spiral marries together cyclical time, which is the subject of these books, and linear time, personified in Greek cosmology as Aion and Chronos respectively.

But this is a real ammonite. It’s anything between 66 million and 400 million years old. This is deep time, unimaginable, and yet present here in a physical form you can touch before embarking on the journey.

The complete description of these volumes is extremely long, so I have broken it up into three parts that can be read in any order.

On to Solar Time, Lunar Time or Planetary Time