Snail Time

2021

Collaboration with Lucy Meyle

Fibreglass ‘spring riders’, bark, orange paper, masking tape, Snail Time dewey decimal instructions, publication surreptitiously placed in the Auckland University Library’s general collection on the 31st March 2021 (115 ML21; 594.0995 ML21; 701.4 ML21).

Snail Time adopts the image of the snail to open up playful research into the related spaces of the library and the playground; and how symbols, images, and representations of time are circulated or concealed within them.

This project is a collaboration between Lucy Meyle and Ziggy Lever, developing on from ideas that came out of our previous works, especially Looking Forwards and Backwards, an installation at Blue Oyster Project Space in 2017. In that show, a large helical plywood ramp was installed in the larger of the two spaces. In a space in the centre of the ramp, two mirrors caught a projection of an archival image of tree asters that we found in the Hocken Collection. The projected image rotated slowly, divided into two halves that moved around the room and onto the street, occasionally recombining on the wall as a folding of time and space in the image. Thinking about this work, and its overarching premise of looking simultaneously forwards into the future moment and backwards to the past, it is the basis from which Snail Time emerged.

Changing tense, in the Window, you will find two sculptures that resemble playground spring riders. Bark lines the floor, and sheets of “flame orange” A3 paper are stuck in a grid to the back wall. Reflections and light bouncing off the window interrupt the scene, moving across the snail and leaf and the orange paper grid to form a temporary image space that strikes across the surface of the installation. The cover of this book is taped to the window on the far hand- right side, and you can imagine the smell of the bark as you approach the text. You might pick up a copy of this cover, and discover a list of books and media that appear when searching “SNAIL TIME” in the library catalogue. One of these entries will stand out, a fluro pink record with the title of this publication and an associated Dewey decimal number.

115 ML21
594.0995 ML21
701.4 ML21

You take the hint on the page (or a hint made by the artists), and form small groups to go forth in the library and investigate. Congratulations you found it! With thoughts about snails and libraries and playground equipment, you read this introduction hoping it will elucidate the text in front of you.

Lever, Ziggy and Meyle, Lucy., Snail Time. Catalouge covertly distributed into the University of Auckland Library's city campus collection in three locations. Part of the work "Snail Time" at Window Gallery, 2021.

The snail is often considered to be ‘sub’, as in underneath something: under its shell, under a foot, in the undergrowth, being ridden on in the playground. In Western art history it symbolised subconscious desires and bodily processes hidden from the human eye. In their hibernated and desiccated states, or when they retreat into their shells, it can be hard to tell if the snail is still even alive. In writing about the snail for the accompanying book SNAIL TIME, we came to think of the notion of the ‘sub’ library – how texts can become tied to one another across the categories and indexes of the ‘main’ collection. These ties create slippages within the shelves. In the everyday experience of searching for a title and finding it not in the stacks, the authority of the library is called into question. Snail Time proposes to meet the snail, springer, library, and playground in a field of open query, where ideas and thoughts connect indirectly via shimmering trails of meaning that spiral in and out of the pages.

"Snails complete a kind of interconnected triad with Snail Time. An unknowable third place alongside libraries and playgrounds, which are much more familiar, to most people anyway, I would guess. Snails are unknowable despite the number of fantasies and metaphors that, in Lever and Meyle’s words, people tend to stuﬀ into their shells: laziness, the resurrection, seasonal harvest, unknown threats, impotence, sexual desire, and even the habit of referring to the shell as the snail’s house."

— from Shell Shelf, essay by Simon Palenski, 2021.