Ruth Ewan is an artist based in Glasgow whose work addresses ideas of power and questions representations of time, rebellion and repression. Often emerging from site-specific research her artworks take a variety of forms form live events, performance, writing, radio programmes, books, and of course sculpture, several of which have taken the form of clocks. In 2011 she installed ‘We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted to Be’ in Folkestone in Kent, which featured ten decimal clocks, dividing the day into ten periods rather than twenty-four. Midnight becomes ten o’clock, midday becomes five o’clock, each new hour contains one hundred minutes and each new minute contains one hundred seconds. In 2016 she created ‘Another Time’, a meadow and test-bed which temporarily transformed a disused field within the grounds of Cambridge University into a non-mechanical clock. The meadow contained twenty-eight plants species carefully selected for their predictable flower opening and closing times – an idea first hypothesised by the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus in 1751. In 2019 she created ‘Silent Agitator’ for New York High Line, based on an illustration originally produced for the Industrial Workers of the World labour union by North American writer and labour activist Ralph Chaplin. The illustration was one of many that appeared on “stickerettes,” known as “silent agitators,” millions of which were printed in red and black on gummed paper and distributed by union members traveling from job to job.
Keith Scobie Youngs is a horologist, clock maker, and managing director of Cumbria Clock Company. His work has included the restoration of the UK’s most famous clock: Big Ben, the timepiece on Queen Elizabeth Tower in Westminster, the Royal Liver Building in Liverpool, which has the largest clock dials in the country, Hampton Court Palace and a major restoration of Manchester Town Hall’s clock. He also looks after clocks at Salisbury Cathedral, which houses the country’s oldest working clock, as well as historic London Underground clocks and other horological gems.
Ruth and Keith have known each of the for many years having worked together on Ewan’s time-based artwork for Folkestone. For this talk Ruth and Keith will talk about their shared interest in horology, creating art and time pieces, and how they kept Big Ben’s visit to Cumbria secret for so long.
