The Golden Bough: Grace Weir: In my own time

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26 February 2009 - 24 May 2009

Applying the Golden Bough theme as underlining support structure for showcasing significant art practices, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane has invited distinguished contemporary artists to exhibit in Gallery Eight of Charlemont House. The Golden Bough suite continues with work by artist Grace Weir.

Weir’s exhibition is an installation centred on her film, In my own time. The film consists of a series of interlinking episodes that explore philosophical, scientific and cross-cultural attitudes to perceptions of time. Einstein's theories regarding the relativity of time, contentious scientific questions about whether the world’s civil timekeeping may slowly diverge from the rotation of the earth, and an investigation into the potential for time travel are among the topics investigated. These sit alongside episodes revealing how, in ancient societies, before weights and measures were standardised, time and space were regarded in terms of direct experience. Weir draws on Vedic texts which use “as long as it takes to milk a cow” to measure time and “ the range of a stone thrown by a man of medium stature” to measure distance.

Strongly influenced by 19th-century scientific demonstrations, the artist explores these ideas through her own actions and activities. However Weir’s work is as much involved with the qualities and structures of film-making as it is with science. The film explores the connection between the concept of one’s self as a being in time and the sense of one’s life as a narrative. Weir seeks to align a lived experience of the world with scientific understanding, and she is interested in an approach to film-making that acknowledges the necessary subjectivity of all experience. Events in the film are portrayed in a rational, almost documentary style; but oscillate between fact and fiction and between documentary and cinematic illusion.

Forming the rest of the installation are two works, one an animation called Clock shows a dandelion seed head rotating on its stem. The other, Script 1, is the first in a new series of short films, showing the artist creating pinholes in a piece of paper to spell out words, relevant to the filmed activity or making reference to filmic terms, which appear when held up to a beam of light.