Thread Count by Jessie Sheng

Artist Statement

“Thread Count” is a durational sculpture that uses motorized embroidery thread to depict the passage of each real hour while simultaneously investigates various methods of measuring and defining time.

Broadly speaking, we understand time to be objective in the sense that it persists with its own logic, irrespective of human thought and activity. In tandem with this belief, the clock was developed over centuries to become an automated system for observing, quantifying, and measuring time as well as organizing humans on a universal scale. The clock as we know it today is cold and relentless, with its priority on the present and a certain tendency to forget and move on.

Embroidery on the other hand involves a series of micro-repetitions similar to clockwork yet is regarded traditionally as a domestic practice performed by hand. It is a human-centred process that is a reflection of the lived experience in which it is embedded.

Thus in “Thread Count”, the act of weaving, which serves as the mechanical production of time here, ubiquitously erases the subjective experience of the human by replacing it with the objective hand of the machine.

The clock however, still pervious to the passing of real time, has a lifespan based on the supply of thread and battery power. As a consequence, the clock must inevitably work towards its own destruction in order to configure new time for the viewer. During this process, the piece makes a departure from the objective realm as it unravels not only itself but also its grasp on linear time before finally settling as a blank, frozen canvas wherein the end is absolute yet seems to allude to a beginning.

From Volume 3
Selected by Philip Ocampo, Visual Arts Editor, and Lucy Lu, Photography Editor