Created during a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, Time Clips the Wings of Love emerged after Si Sapsford heard a pianist perform the piece in the concert hall beneath the studios. The image is cinematic and deeply familiar: a woman at a dressing table in fading light, suspended in the moment before a first dance. Skirted in yellow organza, the dressing table becomes both object and body—holding anticipation, desire, and the fragile intensity of memory.Moving in rhythm with the music, the sculpture accelerates and slows, mirroring the unstable nature of recollection itself. An angled mirror reflects the viewer back into the work, collapsing the boundary between observer and memory.

 

The title references Anthony van Dyck’s Time Clipping the Wings of Cupid, encountered in Paris on the same day. In the painting, Father Time severs Cupid’s wings, grounding love and undoing its illusion of permanence.The work explores unstable boundaries between memory and presence, intimacy and performance, romance and loss. It holds the tension between the glamour of desire and the quiet erosion that follows. That erosion is echoed in the gradual degradation of the original video footage, where time becomes not simply a subject but an active material within the work.