Rotting Figure

Directed by Dan Guthrie

The Blackboy Clock, which incorporates a wooden blackamoor figure in its design, was originally assembled by a Gloucestershire watchmaker in 1774, during the height of the transatlantic slave trade. Relocated to a specially constructed niche on the front of a former schoolhouse in 1844, the clock has undergone restorations in 1977 and 2004 and has remained a constant presence throughout Dan Guthrie’s life in Stroud. Rotting Figure is one of two newly commissioned videos that put forward the ‘radical un-conservation’ of the clock—a new theoretical concept proposed by Guthrie to describe the acquisition of an object with the express intent to destroy it. Central to this new body of work are questions about what society chooses to memorialise and how we do so.