The Phenomenon of Age and the Temporal Extension of Place

Ruskin once alluded to ‘ageing’ in buildings as “the golden stain of time”, noting “there is actual beauty in the marks of it”.

Whilst we superficially understand the affect to which Ruskin refers, if we consider how physical ‘marks’ upon a building might cause us to feel ‘time’, the situation is less clear. We might similarly question the ‘aesthetic’ response he experiences since these marks must surely corrupt the artistry of the building.

Our whole world is characterised by changes that occur over time; we are surrounded by ripening fruit, growing trees and wrinkling skin (as well as crumbling buildings), and it seems we know objects biographically as much as by their physical qualities. Importantly, as entities change, so does their meaning and it matters to us where an object is within its change narrative (what page of its biography it is on, if you like). Consequently, our perceptual processes are pre-disposed to chronologise the objects we encounter and the research proposes that it is these pre-reflective perceptual ‘judgements’ that we experience as objective age.

The practice-based research project employs phenomenological texts and works of sculpture to investigate the “material-temporality” of natural entities and artefacts. It proposes cognitive mechanisms that might imbue physical objects with temporal characteristics and how our everyday experience of the spatial realm is temporally extended through these perceptual processes. Throughout, the tool of art practice secures the elusive phenomenon of age and repositions temporal sensations within the spatial arena to allow their study.

The thesis finally considers how the perceptual mechanisms through which we understand the growth and decay of Natural entities are applied to man-made artefacts. Here, a curious reversal is apparent where the age we experience from the object derives from a reflectingback of the inherent generational structure of ourselves, the subject.