Timbre of Time (2000) places copper foil over a plaster-ground panel laid on the floor and suspends cotton cloth impregnated with an aqueous acetic-acid solution above it. The liquid permeates the cloth and falls drop by drop onto the copper. Each contact initiates oxidation, gradually producing verdigris on the reddish surface. The work is made not through depiction but through infiltration, falling, collision, and oxidation themselves.

The question is not how to represent time, but under what conditions time becomes fixed as a trace in matter. Each droplet produces a faint “pang” as it strikes the panel, while the viewer looks down and witnesses the surface changing from a measured distance. What will finally be inscribed cannot be determined until the exhibition ends; the artist’s gesture recedes. The work is therefore not a completed image but a situation in which time continues to act.

The direct impetus for using foil came from participating in Anya Gallaccio’s 1999 workshop Silence is Golden, together with technical instruction in foil application from Eijiro Terada. In Gallaccio’s work, written words were sealed invisibly beneath gold leaf; here, by contrast, elapsed time accumulated visibly on the copper surface. The inquiry into how time settles into matter would soon turn toward another question: the conditions of the subject who witnesses that change.