26
January 2027

Time Machines: Clocks in Art and Literature from c.1300 to Now

Welcome to The Arts Society Wensleydale
Tuesday, January 26, 2027 - 13:45
Tennants Garden Rooms
Harmby Road Leyburn DL8 5SG
Online Event

Join Christina Faraday to discover how clocks do far more for our society than merely tell us what time it is

Few people nowadays give more than a second thought to their clocks: practical, sometimes beautiful, devices that form the background noise of our daily lives.

But from their introduction in the thirteenth century onwards, clocks have held a variety of philosophical and social meanings.

This talk explores the visual and literary uses of the clock, the varied meanings it could hold throughout the ages: as an ominous symbol of oncoming death, but also as a metaphor for the soul, for capitalism, and for the good use of time.

We will consider medieval manuscripts and frescoes, poetry by Dante and Jean Froissart, still life and genre paintings, satires by Jonathan Swift, Lawrence Sterne, and Hogarth. We will consider nineteenth-century ideas about power and the working day, in portraits of emperors and seamstresses and novels by Dickens.

Finally, we will consider the breaking down of temporal certainties in the twentieth century, with Dali, Chagall, Harold Lloyd, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Christian Marclay.

Christina Faraday
Dr Christina Faraday (she/her), FSA FRHistS, is a historian of art and ideas, specialising in the art and material culture of the Tudor period. She has additional interests in contemporary art and literature that responds to historical art practices. She is a Research Fellow in History of Art at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and a BBC New Generation Thinker. Her first book, Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England (Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press, 2023) was based on her AHRC-funded PhD research at the University of Cambridge. Her second book, The Story of Tudor Art (Head of Zeus, 2025), is the first book to cover fine and decorative arts across the whole Tudor century. Christina contributes regularly to popular media, including BBC Radio 3 and Apollo Magazine, and hosts British Art Matters podcast for The Walpole Society, of which she is a Trustee. In 2021 she was shortlisted for the British Journalism Awards in the Arts and Entertainment category. During her PhD she worked part-time as a Curatorial Intern at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and as guest curator for the Heong Gallery at Downing College, Cambridge, she will curate the 2026 exhibition Tudor Contemporary.