Hester Oerlemans
Ticking
30 May – 30 June 2024

‘Ticking’ is an ongoing series of drawings by Hester Oerlemans. For years, she has been photographing clocks all over the world, digital or analogue, at stations, churches or on the streets. The photographs then led to daily drawings of these timekeepers.
In visual art, we see time depicted in various ways, for example, in the vanitas paintings with a sandglass or clock next to a skull and a burning candle. Clocks symbolically refer to memory and impermanence, past or future, and the inevitable progression of time.

​In her oeuvre, Oerlemans has often used the concept of a clock, for instance, in her three-dimensional works ‘help/held’ and ‘1961’. Both consist of rotating letters or numbers. As the letter p in the word help rotates, it constantly changes from help to held (hero) and vice versa. The digits 1961 rotate on their own axis, but they always display 1961. This is the only year in the 20th century where this rotation works and is also the year the artist was born.

Through drawing, she explores the mystery of time daily – measured time mingling with the individual experience of time. In her drawings, time sometimes becomes lost, mixed up or is no longer visible at all.
Oerlemans seems, in these works, to disrupt the expected perfection of clocks as time meters. The difference between measuring time and experiencing it becomes fluid.

For the artist, all these clocks also carry memories of journeys as well as moments that drew her attention in everyday life.
​For this exhibition, Hester Oerlemans has created a mural based on the stencils she uses for the drawings, and the mural features several drawings from the ‘Ticking’ series. In addition, Oerlemans presents a number of sculptures showing her fascination for air, space and vacuum.