The Dial Surfaces in Green

The dial faces you straight on, the way it does in the half second before you check the time and forget the watch is even there. Here that instant is held still. The bezel, the hour markers, the crown, the hands pinned at a moment that will not move again, all of it drawn as a field of fine scratches and coarse white marks catching the light against a dial left otherwise dark and unlit, exactly where the light would not reach it.

The glass beneath is deep green, and the green is not decoration. It is the colour divers trust to read depth, the colour of the bezel and strap on the watches this one descends from, a colour that has always meant endurance under pressure rather than display. Set into green, this particular watch stops being a glint on a wrist and becomes something closer to an instrument for measuring how long things last.

No paint, no print. The image is scratched into the surface of the green mirror glass, built by removal rather than addition, so what reads as drawn light is really the surface worn away until it catches what falls on it.

Stand close and the dial dissolves into a field of individual marks, controlled scratches laid with a steadiness that leaves no single mark more important than the whole. Step back and the watch reassembles into something monumental, oversized, held in a dark that gives it room to be looked at rather than simply worn.

The work is always visible, with or without direct light on it. Light does not create this image, it sharpens it, and the surrounding room, whatever room that happens to be, shows up in the mirror around the watch rather than inside it. Walk past and the reflection shifts, the gallery around you enters the glass, your own outline settles among the dark hour markers. The image itself never leaves.

The Dial Surfaces in Green continues the Art on Mirror series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which scratched imagery is set into coloured mirror glass and the viewer becomes part of the work. This work is unique.

"Time does not announce itself. It just keeps surfacing, mark by mark, until you notice."

More about the artist, process and materials can be found on the About page.

Questions about this work, availability or shipping can be sent through the contact page.