Anita Groener - RHA Gallery, Dublin, 2006

RHA GALLERY, DUBLIN, 2006| CROSSING Photography Denis Mortell

Of the many metaphors that comprise and shape selfhood and of the many images we deploy to think about ‘self’, that of ‘self as road’ is surprisingly uncommon. Even when we shift our attention to the idea of ‘time’ and consider self as a process that unfolds and enfolds over time, the metaphor of self as road retains its rarity while at the same time remaining implicit in a still more abstract concept which philosophers have called ‘The Moving Time Metaphor.’[i] Time is here imagined as ‘objects’ which ‘move past’ an observer. Where the observer is located is understood as the present, the space ‘in front’ of the observer is the future and the space ‘behind’ is the past. The idea of the ‘passage of time’ is then understood as the motion of objects past the observer ‘from’ the future ‘through’ the present ‘to’ the past. So ingrained is this metaphor of time in our ways of structuring reality, and of constructing our ‘selves’ as subjects of this reality, that we need to be reminded that it is a metaphor and not ‘literally’ true. It is just one amongst a number of ways for fabricating our concept of time.

Ciarán Benson, 2006, Excerpt from an essay published in Crossing