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TIME’S UP
An 18th Century Tower, 1,111 ticking clocks and a Japanese sound artist. These things all come together in a new Exhibition from Yukio Fujimoto. The location is Perrott’s Folly, built in 1758, now interestingly caught between various types of inner city housing. It formed part of the inspiration for Tolkien’s The Two Towers and has only recently been re-opened after closing its doors twenty years ago.
Inside you’ll find a narrow stone staircase winding up to the first room which on entering appears to be empty and run down. With paint pealing from the ageing mouldings, the place has certainly seen better days. Then you notice a tiny clock softly ticking in the centre of the room, insignificant at first, but you are only on the first floor. There are six octagonal floors in the building, accompanied by a very steep and narrow climb up the twisting stairs. The sound of the ticking accumulates as you climb higher, each room with more clocks than the room before: first ten, then a hundred and finally a thousand clocks all ticking in one room. And in this last room there are clocks on every surface available. You can barely move as almost all floor space is covered with small, black clocks. The initial feeling is one of being engulfed by powerfull white noise from the chaotic ticking of a thousand tiny, red hands. But the closer you move your head toward different areas of the room the greater that area of sound becomes and you begin to hear strange melodic rhythms forming as hundreds of clocks sync their ticks while others tock. It’s an amazing experience.
The Tower of Time is an IKON Gallery off-site Exhibition, on now until 26 July
Perrott’s Folly, Waterworks Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, England. Open Thursday – Sunday, 1-5pm. Free
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