"The true collector is held captive not by what has been acquired, but by the act of acquiring. To collect is to rescue things, precious things, from neglect, from oblivion, from the unhappy fate of belonging to someone else."
— after Susan Sontag
Midsummer. The garden is at its fullest, every leaf at the height of its green. In the middle of this abundance sits a man cast in bronze.
He was once flesh. Somewhere on his long road, with an old suitcase for a seat and an umbrella for a rain that never fell, time caught up with him and set him like a monument: hat, coat, face and hands, all one cooling metal. A clock is set into his chest where a heart should be. It still keeps the hour, as if he has become time's own vessel.
His head has fallen to one side, and his gaze rests somewhere above the garden, neither awake nor asleep. At his feet lies a small patch of freshly dug, bare earth. He does not look at it. Nothing in the frame speaks of death, and yet everything does: even in high summer, even in youth, the ground is already waiting. Et in Arcadia ego.
The Timekeeper cannot stop time. He can only do what every true collector does: rescue what is precious from oblivion. Not things, but moments, before they too go into the dug earth.
Collect moments, not things. Every moment matters.
The earliest work in My Wonderland, and its first steampunk figure. Its question, time, its passage and its quiet entropy, runs through everything that came after.
(Fine Art Photography. Created in 2012.)
