Robert Powell: Hall of Hours @ Edinburgh Printmakers

Since 2020, Robert Powell has been on an art-philosophical mission to understand and interpret how we exist in time, prompted in part by his child’s suggestion to 'make stuff about clocks.' Powell’s work spans printmaking, video, sculpture and text, characterised by a surreal kind of world-building that fizzes with dark humour, satire and innuendo. Unsurprisingly then, his ‘stuff about clocks’ is a delightfully intricate and eccentric response to the abstract mystery of time. His latest exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers, Hall of Hours is a fantastical effort to heed his toddler’s call in the most ambitious and complete way yet.

The ground floor exhibition space at Edinburgh Printmakers is a near-perfect cube of white walls and concrete floors. A space almost atemporal in its hyper-negativity, it is appropriately suited to Powell’s experiments in horology. Here, clock-time is replaced by story time – a unit of measurement not connected to any symbolic set of numbers, but to the various cycles of human experience and the existential stories we tell ourselves to explain them. Governing Powell’s story-time is his 'big clock', as his toddler puts it, which stands against the back wall like a 4.5-metre-high automatic pop-up card with the architectural design of a Moorish palace.

Storyboard scenes replace numbers on the etched copper face of this big clock. Circling the face are twelve discs, each made up of a further twelve motifs. Each disc evokes the rich imagery of religion, myth, fable and folklore. Powell’s references are geographically and historically expansive, pulling together icons and symbols from ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Anglo-Saxon storytelling. They mingle with Powell’s own idiosyncratic figures that seem like wobbly-lined amalgamations of them all: chubby cupids, breasted sphinxes, centaurs in breeches and a barefoot ghost.

Hall of Hours by Robert Powell. Photo by Alan Dimmick.

To play with surrealism in such minute detail takes a unique combination of intelligence and imagination that fellow Scottish artist Alasdair Gray similarly embodied. Perhaps it is the dedication to storytelling that evokes the comparison with Gray, though the two artists also take a similarly satirical view of human life and its eccentricities, as informed by their eclectic mental archives. Powell’s etchings bear resemblance to Gray’s illustrations made to accompany his 1981 epic novel, Lanark: A Life in Four Books. Like Gray, Powell has a skill for crafting intricate pictures that communicate dense, referential narratives while remaining bewilderingly hypnotic.

In Hall of Hours, visitors are drawn into Powell’s hyperreality through optical illusions and a continuous sound installation of tick-tocking voices. The installation is recorded by members of Powell’s family, spanning four generations from his five-year-old child to his 95-year-old grandmother. At 12pm daily, five copper bells by the entrance are rung, breaking visitors out of their trance with a brief return to clock-time. The bells are, like the rest of the exhibition, credited as much to Powell’s family as to himself. Etched by Powell but forged by his father, they hang as an ode to generational craftsmanship and, perhaps, a subtle critique of mass production processes.

In his investigations in time, Powell takes a postmodern approach that is acutely aware of its ending. The threat, or reality, of climate collapse looms large over his work in fireballs, freak storms and a feudal hierarchy that points to those responsible. His watercolour etchings depict vaguely apocalyptic scenes barely concealed in pastel hues that distract if your attention-span is short enough. With his doomsday clock ticking in the background, Powell asks us to listen more intently, look a bit closer and think a bit harder. Hall of Hours imagines the time to do that. 

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Robert Powell: Hall of Hours, Edinburgh Printmakers, until 2 Nov, 10am-6pm