A few weeks after the opening, you go back to Bristol for a talk at the gallery with a local charity. You sit in front of one of your artworks and chat about what they’ve been doing in the city to memorialise those enslaved, and how their work overlaps with your experiences of navigating bureaucracies surrounding the clock. It feels good to be using the show to give space to these sorts of conversations and you’d like to think that they’re happening informally outside of an event context.

After this, you don’t go back to Bristol for a while. From London, you start to see your work through other people’s eyes; print reviews that you collect copies of like a magpie and Instagram stories that you feel self-conscious about reposting. After existing in your head and on your hard drive for so long, it feels good, yet slightly surreal, to have distance from the work.

The show becomes the gossip attached to your name. Your ears haven’t been burning like you thought they would, but the serotonin rush of ‘I was talking about your show with…’ still hits when it’s uttered, every time. Your name gains syllables and you start getting introduced as Dan-With-The-Show at parties. You learn how to summarise the complexities of your work into a few pithy quips over a drink.

You only go back to Bristol as the show draws to a close there, twice in the course of two weeks. The first time is for the gallery’s Open Studios on a searingly hot Friday evening, where you’re one amongst hundreds turning up to look at what the city’s artists have been working on. It feels good to be anonymous in the crowd and you spend more time catching up with friends in their studios than standing anywhere near the gallery itself.

The second time is on the final day of the show. After slowly making your way through the city centre, streets lined with spectators turning out in force for a half marathon, you and a new friend slip into the near-empty gallery unnoticed. You give him a private tour – trying your hardest to stop yourself watching him watch your work – before heading off to the pub together for a Sunday afternoon pint.

You thought you’d feel more emotional about the end of this chapter but honestly, you’ve been too busy prepping for the next one to let it properly sink in. You knew from the start that you had to do a version of the show in Stroud. It didn’t make sense to create work that’s inextricably linked to the town without bringing it back there in some shape or form.

Back when you came home to Stroud to film one of the videos in the show, you reached out to a local arts centre that you used to be a trustee of to see if they could help make this happen. They kindly offered you a slot in their gallery for free, and by pulling in a few favours, you’re able to gather the equipment to stage one of the works there. You choose to show the video that presents a plausible near future, where the figure is no longer on display, five minutes down the hill from where it currently stands. Each day, as you walk past the figure on the way to the gallery, you’re unable to stop yourself from involuntarily glancing up at it.

The show becomes a container for conversations, and over the course of two weeks, you chat to: review panel members, taskforce members, council workers you’d worked with before, the new MP and his team, a resident of the building that the clock is on, someone from the National Trust, a group of art students from your old sixth form, some young people from a radical education collective, your parents, your parents’ friends, complete strangers, people who had recently moved to Stroud and didn’t know the clock was there, people who said they knew it was there and but hadn’t looked at it properly, people who thought it had already been taken down after seeing your work, and some people who just wanted to take a breather on their way back home and enjoy the sounds of birdsong and children playing.

Plenty of people peer through the window, preferring to stand outside and engage from a safe distance rather than come in for one-on-one chat. Sometimes they smile, sometimes they glare, sometimes they look at the poster outside instead of making eye contact. You tally them separately on your visitor numbers sheet as ‘the watchers’. Even if they don’t want to discuss the clock with you, you’ve at least planted some sort of seed.

One evening, you do an in-conversation event with the curator of a nearby museum. It’s a good turnout, more than you were expecting, and it’s the first time that there’s been a public forum for conversations about the clock in Stroud. You talk about your work, but what people are really here for is the chance to talk about what’s on their mind. Most of the comments from the likes of inquisitive teachers and local activists seem well thought through but one guy takes the opportunity to launch into a five minute stream of consciousness. Vox pops, dress labels, and living in Brixton; it’s muddled, but with a good intention, so you let him say his piece and be heard.

After two weeks of conscious listening, you pack everything down and head back to London. You’re tired, but at the same time, you feel refreshed. The work needed to be shown in Stroud and the conversations around the clock needed to be had. You feel like you’ve done something important in the real world, so you head into the gallery in London, on a Monday afternoon, ready to put on a show for the art world.