Yesterday was commissioned by Harewood House in Yorkshire as a response to an exhibition of Sevres porcelain. The curator, Nicola Stephenson, wrote this text for the work:

Yesterday is an exhibition of new commissions and existing works that particularly respond to the current exhibition on the State Floor of Sèvres porcelain  In Pursuit of the Exquisite. 

On his first visit to Harewood, Dan Scott was particularly drawn to the music clock reputed to have belonged to Queen Marie Antoinette, and the way that a single object can powerfully act as a bridge between our selves, a historical time and an iconic figure. Although these are inanimate objects, the clock and the vases featured in the videos, can perhaps be seen as `portals` or `time-travelling witnesses` to history.

When we watch the video Tingle we are briefly connected with many things: the possible interior landscape and thoughts of the young Marie Antoinette, the awareness that we are listening to the same sound of the clock ticking and chiming that she heard; a sense of time passing and our melancholic position of knowing what the future holds for her in contrast to her playful interaction with time and the clock.

This bittersweet sense of time passing is reinforced by the other new commission made for this exhibition All Our Yesterdays. Some of the 600 versions of Yesterday play at regular intervals throughout the day, filling the Gallery with renditions in different languages and styles. Yet from reggae to opera, each version contains the unmistakeable sound of yearning for something lost and out of reach.

The artist has said: “I think a wider theme in this exhibition is time and attempts to disturb or disrupt it. The film is someone seducing time, the same song repeated over and over becomes something desperate about wanting time to go backwards.  The film featuring the Sèvres vases, and the framed silk-screens of the pots are about accessing time through inanimate, apparently time-less objects.”

Yesterday (Tingle) from Dan Scott on Vimeo.