Lauren Baker | Slowing Down Time
Lauren Baker | Slowing Down Time | Side View
Lauren Baker | Slowing Down Time | In Situ
Lauren Baker
Slowing Down Time, 2022
White neon, glass, mixed materials, white box tray frame
122 x 152 x 8 cm
48 x 59 7/8 x 3 1/8 in
48 x 59 7/8 x 3 1/8 in
Further images
Slowing Down Time is a recalibration of time and perception. In white neon, glass and mixed materials, Baker builds a wavy-outlined form that borrows the silhouette of an hourglass, the...
Slowing Down Time is a recalibration of time and perception. In white neon, glass and mixed materials, Baker builds a wavy-outlined form that borrows the silhouette of an hourglass, the oldest symbol of measured time, and bends it: during meditation, the artist explains, time feels like it bends and slows, so the outline wavers where a clock's would hold straight. Inside, shards of chalky white glass appear to trickle downward like sand through an egg timer, but these fragments are thoughts, memories, concepts and stories, brittle enough that they seem they could cut. The work grew directly from Baker's Ten Days of Silence, the meditation retreat from which she emerged with a practice of making stillness visible. Where the hourglass narrows, the piece opens outward into an expansive, moon-like terrain of white, representing the expansiveness that opens up once the hourglass bends into a timeless space of possibility. Gentle waves of light create a visual language that loosens linear thinking and lets an internal rhythm become the primary architecture. The calm of deep meditation, she writes, holds bliss inside it; the work offers that stillness as both resistance and renewal, inviting the viewer into a quieter, more spacious way of being. Constructed in white neon and glass within a white box tray frame, the work measures H122 x W152 x D8 cm, its scale giving the falling fragments room to feel like a landscape rather than a device. A unique original artwork. £18,000.