Curatorial Statement

‘Climate Clock’ artworks created by world leading Finnish and international artists will be based in Oulu City and Yli-Ii, Haukipudas, Ylikiiminki, Oulunsalo and Kiiminki and will form a permanent sculpture route around the Oulu region, advised by scientists and giving a moment of pause at each location. Alongside this ‘The Most Valuable Clock in the World’, a new artwork co-created with the respective local communities by renowned artists Tellervo Kalleinen & Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen. 

The climate clock is ticking, the snow is melting, and we are learning anew what our forebears knew – that time is not ours to command; that Nature keeps its own time. For ‘Climate Clock’ artists work with scientists and reconnect us to Nature’s time. Can they help us escape the tyranny of our fast modern day time and capture slower time through ideas rooted in the natural world?  

Oulu is one of the world’s northernmost cities and part of nature’s winter mirror to climate change, just below the Arctic Circle and warming at four times the rest of the earth. Climate Clock explores how this faster heating is changing the weather and natural systems. These, although part of everyday life and easily taken for granted in Oulu, are extraordinary to visitors. Including the brilliant whiteness of winter with the sun’s low glowing light across the horizon; dark rivers in the undulating snow; ice roads crossing the solid frozen sea and vibrant short hot summers with verdant green; alongside local customs such as fishing on the sea ice dating back to prehistory.   

Human rhythms, like the seasons and wildlife, have always responded to sunlight. Being towards the top of the earth’s sphere, on the shortest day of the winter solstice, Oulu receives an hour of sunlight, whilst in the mid-summer it is the reverse. In the past our slower lives enabled us to have moments where we forgot time before the technological clocks of mobiles and laptops. The end of a working day was just that people daydreamed on the way home from work. This was part of the concept of time that nineteenth century Finnish poet Eino Leino wrote about in his famous poem Nocturne: 

 ‘Time has ceased and the weathervane is sleeping; Stretches road at twilight end of day, Bound for home unknown, I take its way’. (eng. transl. Rupert Moreton) 

The Arctic was the earth’s complete snow cap and reflected the heat back into space, but now this is changing and the ice is melting, the dark waters are emerging, changing the earth’s systems and with it, our seasons, nature and pace.   

Now our world is getting quicker, our fingers stretch out to our phones, and we demand instant access to a vast array of fast moving and intricate decisions; creating lifestyles which are at odds with natural rhythms and cadences. Nature takes time and does different things at different times; a tree grows for a hundred years, a drop in one ocean reaches another in a hundred thousand years. We tend to think of time as a given; like energy or mass that you can measure. And we do measure it. But time is an abstraction, we have created it for our needs and now with climate change we are up against it. 

Climate Clock reflects on how we have forced our notion of time onto nature, changing it and us. How might we reconsider our fast changing lifestyles and take time, and in doing so understand the preciousness and necessity of living interconnected with the earth’s own natural clock?