The work developed from research into chronic illness, work and time undertaken in dialogue with human geographer Dr Elisabetta Crovara. With Crip Time Watch, I wanted to bring those questions to the scale of something worn directly on the body.

Because the moving image runs in real time, the person on the screen and the person wearing the watch pass through the same hours together, while their experiences of those hours may be very different. That difference matters to me. The watch does not ask the wearer to imagine that they can inhabit my experience. It places two experiences of the same passing time alongside one another.

Compressing a twelve hour work into a small screen changes its relationship to duration. The image travels through someone else’s ordinary day and can be glanced at, ignored and returned to. It might appear during work, waiting, movement or interruption. I was interested in this closeness, in having the work sit directly against the skin without asking for continuous attention.

The sculptural dock developed alongside the watch. I shaped Bodies of the Hour as two intertwined bodily figures surrounded by looping forms that move between the figures and around the device. I did not want the watch simply to sit on a functional stand. I wanted it to become part of a sculpture in which bodies, support and time are physically caught up with one another.

The relationship changes depending on where the watch is. On the wrist, a body carries it. When it returns to the dock, the watch is itself held. The intertwined figures support the device while the loops gather around it, making the watch feel embedded within the sculpture rather than placed on top of it. Removing, returning and charging the watch become small recurring actions within the work.

I was also interested in what happens to a smartwatch when it stops being primarily a tool for measuring the person wearing it. Its familiar functions are built around monitoring and improvement: steps, sleep, heart rate, activity. Crip Time Watch turns that attention elsewhere. The technology becomes a way of carrying another body’s changing relationship to time, while Bodies of the Hour gives that relationship a physical form when the watch leaves the wrist.