In Her Own Time
127cm x 22cm x 6cm
Fabric, thread, beads, trimming, batting and pompom
Have you ever wondered why you can always expect a queue of men outside a Rolex store? While waiting at the bus stop one day, I saw a luxury watch advertisement, and suddenly had an epiphany – the pursuit of bejewelled watches is the pursuit of power.
The phrase “diamonds are forever” was invented for marketing, and still influence consumer behaviour today. How the concept of eternity came to humanity has long baffled me, since the permanence of the universe itself is in question. Wearing a luxury watch certainly gives the illusion that one can wield timeless masculine power, after all, time is the ultimate luxury, especially in a capitalist society, where individuals are expected to function like clockwork, performing tasks with high precision and efficiency.
“In Her Own Time” attends to kairological rather than chronological time, a time which eludes the standardization replicated in the adoption of the Gregorian calendar and 9-to-5 work day. “Kairos”, the ancient Greek word meaning “the right or critical moment”, is also used to denote the moment in which the shuttle could be passed through threads on the loom. As a fibre artist, I can attest that time flows differently when I’m stitching; As a woman, the wax and wane of my menstrual cycles echo the elasticity of time.
Byung-Chul Han reflects in his book “The Burnout Society”, that “today we live in a world that is very poor in interruption; ‘betweens’ and ‘between-times’ are lacking”; Virginia Woolf recognised the necessity of having a room of one’s own. To extend their argument, “In Her Own Time” is an invitation to caress each fold in time, to meander in the between-times and in-between spaces, to allow ourselves the time to dream, to ponder, to play, to grieve, and most importantly, to do absolutely nothing.
