A Garden Growing Inside a Broken Clock

Round 3
Image 1 — "Time breaks– life begins." : 3.40
A tidy crack is a contradiction in terms. The alarm clock is the right object — the most tyrannical timepiece there is, the one that wakes you whether you like it or not — but it has been split down the middle with perfect symmetry and the moss laid neatly into the seam, so the picture illustrates breakage without ever letting us feel it. Everything past that choice is soft: pastel bokeh, a generic sapling, hands that dissolve on inspection.

Image 4 — "Every Second a Seed" : 3.55
The most beautiful light in the round, spent on the least broken clock. Golden hour through the trees, the case blazing, the interior garden densely and convincingly built — as pure surface this is the most accomplished thing here. But nothing has gone wrong in it: the case is merely open, the mood is entirely benign, and the theme's word was broken. Then "Time to Bloom" is lettered across the dial, explaining a joke the picture had already made, and the butterflies and the blue tit arrive as decoration where an idea should have been.

Image 3 — "Garden of the Lost Hours" : 3.75
The only one who understood that a garden needs somewhere to be. Everyone else grew plants out of a mechanism; this one put a whole place inside the case — cypresses, a path, a walking figure, its own horizon and its own light — so the watch is not sprouting, it is containing. That is a far harder picture to build and the recession inside the case genuinely holds. What lets it down is the world outside it: a drab surrealist plain of spires and rubble that gives nothing back, and a pale shape in the left foreground that never resolves into an object at all.

Image 2 — "Without title" : 3.95
The only entrant who put the irony in the room instead of in the title. A sign hangs on the workshop wall reading "We fix clocks like new", and beneath it stands a longcase clock with a tree driven up through its works, in a shop full of other clocks nobody is going to fix either. That one prop turns a pretty conceit into a joke with loss inside it — and the picture then pushes the thought past the single object, because dandelions are coming up through the floorboards too, so it is the whole trade that is losing, not one machine. The light is the hardest in the round and the best handled: cold window against warm brass, rust rather than shine on the gears, real depth back into the shelves. It is murkier than the rest and the lettering wobbles, but this is the only one that is about something. My winner.