Since the 1990s, the concept of ‘recovery in/from serious mental health problems’ has been iterated internationally as the new paradigm in mental health policy and practice. A constitutive element of recovery discourse is a struggle over what defines a ‘good’ life-in-time; yet temporalities of recovery remain under-investigated. This article offers an empirical exploration of recovery enacted in an NHS ‘arts for mental health’ service called Create. I present an analysis of several intersecting temporalities at play within Create through the lens of one service-user’s story. The temporal orderings of the situated aesthetic care practices at Create encapsulate competing articulations of recovery, hope and aspiration. These different temporalities enact different subjectivities, revealing recovery to be a set of socio-political struggles over what lives are deemed liveable in the context of global neo-liberal capitalism.