The daily drawing has begun and I’m already seeing small differences and connections in the types of mark I’m making, how long the drawings are taking and how working at home is different than working in the installation room at college.
I’m at the beginning of the first fulll week of 13.4.13 – 13.5.13 and am anxious that the tasks I have set myself will be difficult to complete on a practical level and, indeed, may not develop into pieces that I want to show in the degree show.
For me, the outcome of this piece is as much the recording and my responses in writing as it is in the drawings produced. They will be two separate entities but as relevant as each other.
I’ve had a few weeks to test some of the ideas and worked in the installation room at college for a few days, working on the daily drawing repeatedly – horizontals, verticals, repeats. As well as the large, daily drawing, I am working on smaller, individual drawings and in sketchbooks.
Already, three days in, I am hyperconscious of time.
As well as the effect on my artistic practice, I’m interested on a personal level how this idea of dividing and cropping chunks of time to perform drawing or painting or writing (or indeed any other work or task) is going to affect the rest of my day to day activities. As I begin to wrestle with how I’m going to work and what the meaning of work will be once I finish studying – the exchange of my time for money is also starting to push forward into my thoughts.
It’s day two of my final degree project, provisionally titled 13.4.13 – 13.5.13.
As I’ve been working through my degree, I’ve realised that in every project, I’ve set myself a task, a project within each module. I find it almost impossible to draw and make work without some kind of structure, paramaters, planned repeats.
Sometimes these are connected by time, sometimes by material, sometimes by activity. Sometimes they have a numerical quality.
In two months time, my degree will be finished. The sketchbooks will be stacked. I’m not sure if we’ll have had our feedback but it will be over, done. It reinforces the idea for me that time is really the only currency worth considering – there are only ever twenty four hours in a day. There are only so many days in a week. No-one gets any more time than anyone else. It’s a finite resource.
I’ve always been interested in the ideas of work, leisure, time off, working time – how we all spend our time, what we do with it – how our activities define us.
I’m a mature student – I have a family and also work part-time. As I’ve got older and the demands on my time have become greater, I plan my time and carve it up, separating out segments for doing this, doing that. Time and what I do with it becomes more precious.
I wanted to explore time with drawing so have set myself various tasks for the month – I am recording time spent drawing and not drawing. Part of my work is the documenting, the writing, the responding to lines with words and vice versa. I suppose what I’m attempting is a sort of forensic examination of this particular time.
