Stephen Willats Travelling with the Good Connector, 2019 Watercolour, ink, Letraset text on paper 27 1/8 x 54 in
The time tumbler is itself an unknown object and a speculative means of slotting new variables into lived reality. Although Willats’s British Museum project was ultimately never realised, and his time machine has not yet seen the light of day, an intriguing series of drawings emerged from these conversations. In diagrammatic works such as Passing Through the Time Tumbler and Re-mixing the Fragments, the time tumbler represents a function that triggers subjective and collective deviations from the dictates of linear time, scrambling and reordering the chaos of fragments that compose everyday experience. In our planned, clockwork world, we are all stuck inside time boxes which organise these fragments in a particular way, composing a normalised image of the present. But, at the same time, we are all potential time tumblers. – John Kelsey
