F. A. Q.s

“There are forms of intelligence embedded in interactions with objects that aren’t straightforwardly translatable into text.” - J.L.Roberts

1) Do you believe Time doesn’t exist?

Absolutely not. I will never profess to know anything about Time other than my experience of it, which changes with each hour that I live. And I may never know what Time is, but I do know that it is inextricably related to what we value, buy, sell, throw away, consume, squander, hoard, love, hate, reject & accept. It connects us all in our common ownership of it, and our common inevitable loss. I made my first watch to remind myself that my own concepts of Time - and my related notions of individuality and spaciousness - are more valid than the larger cultural voice that tells me I am always at a deficit. In the most ageless words of Saint Augustine (354-430 AD): “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

2) Why did you start interviewing people? And how do you choose people to interview?

When I made my first watch, I made it purely as my own object-lesson. But as I wore it (while working as a jeweler, a cook, a landscaper, a student), perfect strangers would see it and share with me their ideas of Time - their fears and hopes and regrets and joys and theories and mysteries. Quite quickly I realized that this was the piece I had been missing all along; the act of just talking to people about their experience of Time instead of searching in philosophical abstractions and quantitative mathematics (not, she says emphatically, that there is anything wrong with those). So, shortly, that’s how I started interviewing people, and the process of choosing who to interview is completely and utterly random and open - whomever wants to talk about Time is invited, whenever.

3) Why is it called the “All Watch” ?

In 1797, the German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote the "Metamorphosis of Plants," a instructional poem that described the development of a typical annual plant from sprout to seed:

“Nature closes the ring of eternal forces; yet a new one immediately connects itself to the previous, which extends the chain throughout all of time, enlivening both the whole and the singular.”

From his observations and contemplations of plants, Goethe began to consider the possibility of the entire plant kingdom as an expression of one plant form, from the perspective of a ‘multiplicity in unity’:

“… a growing aware[ness] of the Form with which again and again nature plays, and in playing, brings forth manifest life… the thought becomes more and more alive that it may be possible to develop all plant forms out of one form.”

To Goethe, when we look at a single plant, what appears to our eyes is not ‘A Plant’, but rather visible parts of ‘THE Plant’. This is an example his vision of ‘multiplicity of unity’, in which the fundamental unity of the natural world is made visible in the multiplicity of forms.

The German name he gave to ‘THE Plant’ is the Urpflanze. This is a compound word, the prefix ‘Ur-” usually translated as ‘all’, ‘archetypical’, ‘primordial’ or ‘primal’. In conjunction with ‘-pflanze’ (plant), we have the All Plant, a name that embodies Goethe’s theory of the concrete unity of the organic world, and of the interrelated correspondence of the abstract and material realms.

The name the “All Watch” is a reference to this theory, and Goethe’s poetic unity of natural observation and metaphysical wonder. There are as many experiences of Time as there are beings living it, and though each All Watch is a singular object, the aim is that they represent the unity of our multiplicities of experience.

A fantastical drawing of the Urpflanze :

4) Why a walnut?

I found the first walnut slice in a dirty corner of my grandmother’s garage. She and my grandfather had lived in Miami since the 1950s, in a tiny flat house nestled on two acres of rare plants and orchids that they collected from all over the world. I never saw her garden in its heyday - by the time I came along, their tropical home was crumbling, the bricks actively subsumed by overgrown jungle plants. It was in that house that I felt the most tangible sense of myself in Time. Walking between my mother and her mother, wearing the clothes of my great-grandmother, sleeping in my mother’s childhood bed which was also my childhood bed, bringing in new blooms from a plant that my grandmother seeded thirty years before my birth; it is an experience that is not neatly nested, and does not unfold in linear order. This is, quite simply, why I made the first walnut watch - to remind myself of this.

5) Who are you?

Hello! I’m Joslyn Richardson. I’m a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Both my grandmother and mother were amateur metal-smiths, seamstresses, and sculptors, so I grew up with these mediums as means to express myself, and during my academic research I found a conceptual framework to express the philosophic and tactile themes of my own artwork. My BA is in Human Ecology, with a focus in botany and philosophy of science. My MA is in the History of Hermetic Philosophy. My graduate thesis was an examination of the silent language of material interaction available to the applied arts, specifically as it applies to artists dealing with philosophic, spiritual and religious themes in their work. The applied arts, which include jewelry, pottery, fiber arts and other mediums that require wearing and use, have a unique language of touch and physical interaction available to them. This inherently wordless quality makes these mediums an often perfect fit for exploration of some of the silent experiential realms found in Hermetic and Taoist philosophy, spirituality and religion.