The exhibition continues into the summer. As part of the live programme, another artist responds to your work, filling the gallery with fog and sound. Fragments of your voice from the artwork’s audio description are contorted around bass, drones, flutes and screams. After their performance, you leave the gallery and step out into the street for a breath of fresh air; body vibrating, heart racing, grinning ear to ear. Someone asks you what you thought of it, and you describe it as the perfect remix.

You drop by the gallery a couple more times during the exhibition’s last few weeks to show people around and then it’s over. On a quiet Sunday evening, the screens are turned off in the gallery for the last time. Soon, they’ll be packaged up with the speakers and shipped back to where they came from. Plans have already been made to offer up the black box for parts as you’ve got nowhere to store it, but you’ve asked to keep some of the smaller panels as keepsakes. Your name in big vinyl letters will be peeled off the wall, the leftover brochures will be put into recycling, and the next artist will begin the installation of his show.

A few days later, you go back to Stroud. The journey takes longer than usual due to planned engineering works, and after meandering around the countryside, a rail replacement coach drops you in the town centre around midday. Feeling like you need to stretch your legs, you decide to walk back up the hill to your parents’ house. You head along King Street, up the High Street, over the zebra crossing, up Nelson Street, and as you reach the top, your eyes automatically lock onto the clock as they have done for the past five years.

Normally you’d just walk on by, avoiding looking so no one tries to start a conversation, but this time you stop in your tracks, stare up at it, and hold eye contact. The last time you did this was when you were shooting one of the videos over a year ago, but nothing has changed since. Your exhibitions have come and gone, and the figure is still there, in the same place it’s been for the past one hundred and eighty-one years. Of course it is.

You know that, realistically, the alcove won’t be empty anytime soon. Even if the people responsible saw the error of their ways, and actually tried to do the right thing instead of remaining silent, they’d have to contend with the machinations of a right wing bureaucracy that’s in favour of keeping objects of ‘contested heritage’ in situ. Meanwhile, the figure – still standing there, club in hand, ready to strike – slowly rots away.

Every millimetre of swelling in the boiling British summers, every millimetre of shrinking in the freezing British winters, every trace of corrosive bird shit staining the tar-black paintwork that covers its body gradually takes its toll. Maybe one day a part of it will break off and splinter when it hits the ground, and only then, rather than repairing it for a third time, they’ll sling it in a skip. Moving at this glacial pace however, the figure will surely outlast you and your loved ones.

By some metrics, your exhibition could be considered a success. Plenty of people came to see it, and it’s certainly moved things forward for you in your artistic practice. But it hasn’t brought about the real world change you were craving, and it seems unlikely to do so down the line, so those two videos you’ve made will remain fiction, not fact, for the foreseeable.

Sure, you were trying to speak to The Art World and not your old neighbours with this new approach, but you hoped the opportunity you’d been given would have helped you make a difference somehow. ‘No one way works, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down’ was one of the quotes you had on your moodboard when you first started the project, taken from a badge a friend had given you years ago. The most you’d got done with your shoving was getting your new MP to make a statement about the clock that led to an ‘ongoing dialogue’ which slowly petered out over the months since.

Your show was inextricable from the work you’d been doing over the last five years to try and make a change in Stroud. When you started, you knew that deep down you were never going to succeed when facing off against a wall of white silence from the clock’s owners. No matter how hard you tried, how solid the concept was, how slick the execution was, this exhibition wasn’t going to change their minds. So is it a failure? You’re both proud of what you’ve done and disappointed in yourself at the same time.

It’s the end of August. It took more than two years to see through the making and exhibiting of this new body of work, and now you’re going home. The show is over.