Kat Austen, Letters and Comments editor
Time is fascinating. I remember trying to envisage this fourth dimension after reading Edwin Abbott's classic novella Flatland, but the resulting imagery was too much for my brain to handle.
It is part of the modern human condition, though, to have a desperate need to capture and measure time, counting every tiny portion of our fleeting existence with watches and clocks. As the custodians of time, these devices are intriguing by proxy - not to mention having their own delicate aesthetic value.
Clocks have featured in many great artworks: Dali's distorted clocks in The Persistence of Memory are a rather obvious example, not to mention their prominent inclusion in Frida Kahlo's Time Flies.
(Image: Zak Waters)
The 3.3-metre-high gold-plated clock is surmounted by a grotesque giant grasshopper, which symbolically devours each minute as it passes. The grasshopper is part of the mechanism - a literal take on the early chronometer's so-called grasshopper escapement, invented by clockmaker John Harrison in the 18th century.
Harrison's design aimed to overcome the problem of inaccuracies in pendulum-driven clocks at sea, which crept in due to the motion of the vessel. The grasshopper escapement's mechanism, which connects the pendulum to the gears of the clock, compensated for any irregular swinging motion.
60 per cent of Taylor's chronometer is built of reclaimed material, even the gold plate. The creature atop it becomes more chilling when you discover that its two large fangs are made of surgical tools that would normally be used in the process of hip replacement for children.
The symbolism of the Midsummer Chronophage's insatiable insect, like that of its older sister the Corpus Chronophage in Cambridge, hammers home the transient and irreversible nature of time.
Perhaps less obvious is the fact that not every minute measured by the clock is the same length. Now longer, now shorter, the minutes pass in a way representative of our human experience.
"It's about presenting time in a relative way," said sculptor Matthew Lane Sanderson, who worked on the project, "but every five minutes it's bang-on accurate" - because it resets.
The clock itself is entirely mechanical, so the irregularities in the length of the intervening minutes are brought about by controlling the amplitude of the pendulum - which is directed by constant communication with an atomic clock. This mixture of 18th-century mechanisms with extremely modern technologies only serves to emphasise the longevity of ideas compared with the brevity of human lifespan.
Some may not like the aesthetics of a giant gold clock, but the choice of materials was carefully deliberated by Taylor, who chose it because of its long-lasting nature. "I chose materials that you know aren't going to change over hundreds of years," he says.
Similarly, stainless steel was used for the chronophage's mechanism so that it will withstand as much wear and tear as possible. "It's going to look like this in 200 years' time," he says.
The relative interpretation of time by the chronophage was in sharp contrast to the other time pieces shown at Masterpiece London.
Take the De Bethune watches, which were being exhibited in the Patrizzi & Co Auctioneers stand. The aim here is to produce the best possible watch, and part of that is to make the watch as accurate as possible, using a mechanism that relies on a high inertia balance wheel and a silicon balance-spring - so that each minute and each second will be precisely the same length.
These watches, along with the other beautiful timepieces being shown, all aim to show us explicitly when we are in the world. However, rather than giving us mastery over time, it feels as though they make time the master of us.
For me, having seen the chronophage's beast eating away life's precious minutes, I think I will stick to living each moment to the full and not spend my time worrying about time.
Masterpiece London is open between 24 and 29 June 2010 at the Former Chelsea Barracks, Chelsea Bridge Road in London.