Tak Tent O’ Time Ere Time Be Tint is a new artwork by Sean Lynch commissioned by Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and Edinburgh Art Festival.
Known as a skilled storyteller with a knack for unearthing little known or underappreciated knowledge, over the last decade Lynch has employed an ethnographic approach to explore the highways and byways of cultural history.
His retellings sway between the anecdotal and informative, fully embracing the allegorical potential of his subjects and emphasising the nature of the places he works in. From finding the remains of the defunct DeLorean car factory in the Atlantic Ocean to organising an exhibition of archaeological forgeries by Flint Jack held in Britain’s museum collections, his videos and installations point to the latent energies and undercurrents of history, and its ability to examine and critique contemporary life.
Lynch’s new project casts a spotlight on Edinburgh’s public monuments and sculptures, today subject to ongoing civic processes to have society acknowledge and understand the legacies of history. His installation at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop explores the use of folk
traditions, the making of sculpture and the parables held inside monuments themselves, which can empower social change and produce a public realm implicitly open to everyone.
Extensive fieldwork on this theme is seen in a new video artwork, while a new series of sculptures resuscitate the use of Coade Stone, a now obsolete building material with a secretive recipe re-discovered by the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop’s technical team over the last year.
Amongst other subjects, an encounter with neolithic carved stone balls and a visitation to the Aberdeen Bestiary, one of Scotland’s most important medieval illuminated manuscripts additionally feature, converging to find the critical impulses that each might bring to egalitarian thought and action today. Accordingly, Lynch’s title, Tak Tent O’ Time Ere Time Be Tint is a memento mori phrase, urging those who read it to make the most of their
time on earth. The phrase, along with a number of other sculptural interventions, was made and placed by builder Stanley Sutherland on Newhaven Road, a minute’s walk from Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop.
