Impressionist tributes, which are then scanned and enlarged. The Five Pure Lights takes its title from the earth’s elements as venerated in Tantric Buddhism: the fragmented abstractions of dancing spectral hues are in fact Tibetan prayer flags blowing in the wind – their concept developed from Almond’s 2006 film, In The Between, about the China-Tibet high speed rail link and its humanitarian implications.

Almond’s intensive travel-orientated processes are replicated through the aesthetics of his sculptural works – trains especially: as the journey mode of choice for romantics, technophiles, and extinct industrial revolutionaries. Cast in aluminium and bronze and painted in traditional railway livery, Towards Tomorrow is a replica trainplate; produced at source by British Rail, they are names given to a train and emblazoned on the side of every mainline locomotive in England. Fanciful and optimistic, Almond’s text is a wistful paradox, its future-thrust message belied by nostalgia. Made from the generic black flip-panel clocks found in all British railway stations, his accompanying Perfect Time Divided sculptures, too, suggest platforms, waiting, and the call of distant places. Assembled in simplified forms, like symbolic totems or alchemic signs and charts (or humorous minimalism), their numbers have been modified, transforming time itself into an ever-updating undecipherable language. Time, for Almond, is reassuringly abstract no matter how logical you make it sound. Set to change precisely minute by minute with Cage-like rigor, Almond’s nonsensical scripts possess a captivating power: a forgotten tongue, or ancient wisdom, an innate universal communication, unfolding – quite literally – with perfunctory mechanics, their cryptic messages persisting with slow-time authority.