Like Clockwork

A large-scale, multi-part, glass mobile with three clock faces in the centre becomes, with its broken timekeeping, a commentary on a rapid social development and a society fixated on measurability. The installation Like Clockwork is created by artist Susanna Marcus Jablonski for the Faculty of Fine Art at the University of Gothenburg.

The three clock faces in coloured glass have hands that move at different speeds and show us the time in hours, minutes and seconds. But time cannot be read. At least not in the way we are used to. Next to them hang painterly, transparent, sculptural fragments that shift in light blue, pink, yellow and grey tones with details in midnight blue and vermilion. The objects and floating figures crouch down, fall, stretch through the room and touch each other as colour and shape merge in a dance between time and space. Perhaps some of the figures are recognisable? Since 1935, Nils Nilsson’s mural Dansen (The Dance) has been in another part of the university building, but a couple of the figures from the work are found in a new guise in Like Clockwork.

Susanna Marcus Jablonski often returns to thoughts about monuments and their potential. Here she has been inspired by how time measurement historically has moved from monumental places to a small object that can be carried in the hand. In Like Clockwork she explores time as a raised monument. A place to temporarily visit and enter.

The three clock faces of the artwork consist of blown flat glass in bright colours, where each glass part with its irregular surface structure and light refraction bears traces of the work of the hand. The glass comes from the iconic glass factory LambertsGlas in Germany, whose method of hand-blown glass is classified as intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO and is found, among other places, in the clock face of Big Ben and in churches, synagogues and mosques around the world.

The title can be interpreted as a play on the idiomatic expression “like clockwork”, that something “is going like a train”, or that something “runs like a well-oiled machine”, in short that something happens exactly as expected. But Like Clockwork can also be understood as a suggestion of something that resembles a clockwork. Like a clockwork. A different kind of order.