Time is Malleable

David Ross

When a Midwinter festival goes wrong, our hosts – a Neolithic tribal leader, a magpie and a standing stone, are accidentally transported through time, from the Land of the Pishinrain 2628BC to Argyll 2031AD. Arriving in Glasgow, they are fascinated by the scale and acoustic properties of the Gartcraig Road salt dome and decide on this as the site of their future festivals and ceremonies. Making use of the unfamiliar objects from their new material world, they design new ceremonies based on those of their past, with a wish to reconnect with their past lives through these familiar acts.

As a tool to create distance from the material world we inhabit and think more deeply on it, the three prehistoric Hosts were embodied and vignettes written and illustrated to consider the Host’s response whilst they explored their new world. If our Hosts managed to send themselves back in time to the Neolithic, and the humans of 2031 returned to their correct time, they would discover the salt dome filled with the objects collected and created by our Hosts. This could become an archaeological exhibition. A view into our material world through alien eyes.

Time is Malleable is the fictional exhibition of the assemblages of objects created by our Hosts. The exhibition is presented through the exhibition ephemera – exhibition guide, postcards and posters. The exhibition guide presents an investigation into material culture and the role the objects we collect and surround ourselves with play in the creation of memory, ceremony, relationships and time.