WORK IN PROGRESS 2025
Mick O'Kelly 2024
RHIZOMATIC TIME 2025
How do we contemplate and represent the complexity of time? There are universal conventions of standard time which most of us share to regulate for commerce, legal and social purposes. There is the urgency of one’s body clock. There is institutional time. In hospital we lose a sense of time. One’s body is observed, measured, assessed, managed and regulated to the rhythm of the hospital machine. Conventional shared understanding of time is arborescent, a linear temporality and horizontal, in a single direction. The clock has twenty-four hours synchronised with the sun and the moon in a wider cosmos of infinite expansion. We make appointments, we wait in the firmament for something to happen. We keep time or does time keep us? We invent all manner of rituals, diaries, schedules to regulate the body, to manage and build a sense of cohesion for the everyday. We have a sense of time that is shared.
But time is not as universal as we might think. I approach the idea that we are all complex and form identities that are marked out by difference and express ourselves with different capacities and abilities. However, some are caught in a milieu whose language is not always easily shared and communicated. People living with cognitive impairment live to a different rhythm who’s time is not universal but unique to how one’s life always proceeds to different rhythms and speeds. They live in a rhizomatic time, a kind of out of time. In the most extreme they live outside language - in a wordless grammarless zone. This may feel like living on the limits of what it feels to be human. I am working with clinicians, care staff, neuroscientists and patients at Tallaght University Hospital (Dublin) and St James’s Hospital (Dublin). Using the Addenbrooke examination (ACE) clock drawing test, we are making a sequence of unique graphite etchings clock drawings 400x400mm with functioning time mechanisms. These clocks perform but do not function, at least in ways we might share or understand. How do we grasp the significance of the unreadability or the untranslatability? How do we live among our most vulnerable whose time we do not share. In a most gently and understated way this asks us to pause and be present in perceiving other modalities of living.
This project is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland Project Award 2025.
Mick O'Kelly 2024
This is work in progress. This work explores ideas of mapping. This approach to mapping is not about longitude and latitude but rather a mapping from ‘within’ that relates to the unconscious, the psyche as a motive force. It is a kind of mapping that is not about locating points and objects, but rather about lines of duration, movement and flow.
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To map the unconscious REM sleep / dream space that confirms and consolidates our desires or help us process the unthinkable, thoughts we rarely give ourselves permission to verbalize.
What tools do we use to represent and bring a visibility to the un-conscious, the unknowable.
For the 3-D model above, I used a PSG2 Sleep Profiler technology, that captured my REM sleep over four nights. Fusion 360 CAD software converted this spectrographic data to a resin 3-D model. This sleep journey resembles more the cinematic mode of cut and paste narrative that rapidly shifts between several modalities simultaneously, more likely generating non-linear narratives. Such mapping will have a different reading that goes beyond the conventional language structure.
This collaboration is supported by Professor Christine Walsh, Neurology at the Memory and Aging Centre (MAC), Clinical Research Coordinator Natalie Pandher and Jenny Tai Engineer at the Makers Lab University of California San Francisco.
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