Whilst talking to my tutor about my project proposal, she pointed me towards Ori Gersht. We were talking about heightened moments in time where things become clear and detail sharpened. I found Ori Gersht's work so inspirational. How he captures moments that the naked eye just cannot register. I watched a few interviews on you tube and loved how he talked about his photos being a fold in time. This struck me as something that I would like to explore and capture in this project. 

I took photos of the activity of my dining table over time. I want to bring value to the ordinary day to day activities that we may not pay attention to. By layering these meals up over time it stresses the value of what happens around this table, and who was there or not there. It places the importance of these meals, and all the feeding and nurturing that goes on.

After visiting the everyday delights exhibition, I was thinking of some of the moments that I have consciously tried to take a snapshot of in my mind; times where you notice the colour of the leaves, or when you reach the top of a mountain and take in the view. 

I have used watercolour to make some sketches of some of these moments. The children in the small square sketches are playing, everyone is happy, and it is an ideal moment that you know, as a parent, probably won't last long, but you try to take a snapshot of it in your mind. I tried to paint little detail in it, leaning on imagination to fill in what is not painted, only hinted at.

I have painted a quick watercolour that tries to capture a mountain setting. I was thinking about those mountain top experiences where you reach the top and take in the view. These moments stay with you, captured and stored in your mind.

The last sketch is about 'noticing.' I wanted to capture a moment where you might notice the colour of the leaves or the way shapes are reflected in a window.

I have also been thinking of Maaike Schoorel's paintings, where they come to your eye very slowly. I have been thinking about white space and the minimal details that need to be painted in order for us to make the rest of the picture up in our mind. 

This was a display in a hospital! I was a bit confused at first as I was walking down hospital corridors to view these photographs. But it soon became quite profound. The work was on the everyday, ordinary life,  capturing small moments of pleasure. It interesting to see other people's perspective on the small things, as we must all have our own kinds of things that we notice. I find, in my own life when I notice details like this time slows down, almost like a bulge of time.

Below are some of my experiments of painting the important details of a picture, and leaving the rest of the space blank. I printed out one of my photos on regular paper. I then applied water to the details on the paper that I wanted to come through. The ink then  bleeds through the back. I printed the wet photo onto blank paper, and then again on another piece of paper, so that the colour becomes fainter and fainter. The colour on the last sheet of paper can barely be seen. This has helped me to think about the white space and the speed that colour reaches the eye.

I really like the effect of the prints- you can't make out a picture, but you can put shapes and colours together in your mind, and I think our brains will automatically try to make a picture out of it.

I have been tracing the table onto tracing paper and layering it up. The effect is the blurring of time. I like how all the lines and shapes cross over each other, bringing movement and activity. I like the overlapping best where you can see hands crossing the table.; a reminder of the people who are around the table.

I copied the tracings at speed using ink and a paintbrush. I wanted to capture the speed and movement of time passing, almost like sped-up footage of the dining table. Something was lost from the previous pictures. The soft pencil, and tracing paper was more poetic. Removing the layers, and the faded layers underneath, making the painting flat, has made it more harsh. I do still think that it carries an element of time in it though.

I have been drawing and recording the loads of washing as a way of recording time and the mundane daily chores. I feel strongly that even though these chores are boring, and are done hidden away in the privacy of our homes, they sustain life and are far more important than we think. What would happen if we didn't do it? Life would be pretty chaotic and dirty. I am not obsessive about keeping everything super clean and tidy, but having a family, means I have lots of people to look after and I need to keep everyone's lives ticking over so that we can all function well and manage the daily run of life!

So I continue with the washing...and the drawings... and the tracings...and the transferring onto the newspaper for the day...

This time I experiment with using watercolour to paint in more of the colour and details of the washing onto the newspaper.

I asked one of my friends at home to come and look at the work that I was producing, to comment on it, and to share her opinion on what she saw. I also wanted to use this as a review of where I am at with my project.

I have layered my daily drawings of my washing on top of each other, so that what you see is a week's worth of washing in one go.

My friend talked about the washing as a necessity to life that if you don't do these necessary chores then life grinds to a halt. She talked about in times gone by there would be washing days. Days were set apart to do the washing as it was a long and physical process. It is less so a physical process, but it is still time consuming and there are many stages to it- washing, hanging, ironing, folding, putting away.

Maybe I could continue this train of thought, and do more work, looking at the process of the washing.

My friend talked about the clothes line getting deeper and deeper, and the layers of pegs becoming more and more. She talked about the things at the back begin to fade, and the layer at the front being the here and now.

I really like this idea, of the washing in the back becoming distant and slowly fading into the past, whereas the most recent load of washing is the most present. This is what I have been enjoying about working with the tracing paper and being able to layer up the work, but still see the lines behind, even as they begin to fade. I feel that this has been a way to record the time as it passes.

I also like the idea that the clothes line gets deeper and deeper. There is something about a regular activity that gets embedded into us and the way we live; maybe a certainty or a security.

The most recent drawing at the front is the one that the brain reads first because it is the boldest, but as you take the time to look more into the drawing the brain registers the details behind, and starts to see more of the details in the layers. This works well with the thoughts I had earlier on in the project where the colours come to the eye at different rates as in Maaike Schorel's work.

We talked about whether colour or collage would work, picking out details in the drawing. We wondered whether it would work to see these colour points or textures peeping through the layers.

There ideas that came out of this conversation were the ideas of drawing washing as it moves in the wing on a washing line; maybe recording the movement on my phone and breaking it down into freezer frames. Maybe I could take these shapes and transfer them to canvas and white sculptures?

This was a really helpful conversation to further my work.

I have really enjoyed looking at Mike Silva this week. There is something addictive about his work. Even though his paintings are of photos and seem so everyday and ordinary, there is something in the quality of the painting that takes me in, and I cannot look away, instead I am intrigued to see more.

I found a photo on the internet of someone vacuum cleaning that gave me a similar feeling and so I decided to paint it, using oil on paper.

I love the symmetry of the reflection in the floor. I couldn't get the white that I wanted , and may go over this with some pastel or chalks, and I want to go over the shutter with chalk.

I was really inspired by Uta Barth's photos. I am not in any way a photographer, but I was inspired to take photos of the light from my windows. This was combined with inspiration from Mark Beldon's paintings, Window XIII, 2016. Oil on linen, 36 x 26cm. His window is full of diamonds like my windows. As I was lying in bed this morning I was just looking out of the window at the tree outside, and I began thinking about what Uta Barth was talking about in one of her essays. She says she spends a long time looking out of windows, and sometimes she photographs what she is looking at. Once the photo is developed it looks nothing like she expected because the photograph is not focused on the part she was looking at- the camera captured everything equally, but Uta's brain had filtered out certain things and focused on a particular object.

I wanted to continue with the window, inspired by Uta Barth and Mark Beldan. I copied the shape of a diamond, from my windows at home, onto some cardboard to make a stencil. I used this to draw around onto an old pair of unwearable jeans. I cut out the diamond shapes and sewed them together as if remaking the window.

I like the colour of the material, sometimes dark, sometimes faded, reminding me of the light and shadows that are cast from the window.

I had a bit of a problem with the tessellation of my shapes, as I had just literally taken the shape from my window without trying it out beforehand, so I had to work the diamond shapes into each other. This meant the final look wasn't as smooth and even as I thought it would be. But in some ways I don't mind this. I feel like life is uneven, and light and time shifts along and we fit into it as best we can.

Patching together the old jeans that my husband and I have lived in over the years. The patchwork, a slow meditative process. The craft that spans time. A way to kill time on these slow days confined to the house.

Easy to pick up and put down, as Virginia Woolf writes in her book, "Women never have a half hour that they can call their own." There are constant interruptions, but this work is easy to put down and pick up where I left off, returning to the rhythm and the meditative nature of the sewing.

 I have been experimenting with everyday objects in relation to how to hang the length of quilted hexagons. I had thought about the rolling on of time, and had pictured the rolling out of the quilt via a handle.

I experimented with different wall attachments and rolling pins, and connections, and decided upon the second picture of objects.

Some shelf supports, a rolling pin, wire from a coat hanger, and a pasta machine handle.

I made holes into the ends of the rolling pin, and the shelf supports. A bigger hole was made for the pasta handle. I connected them together with wire from the coat-hanger.

After spending these weeks confined to home, I am missing the activity of life, and dare I say it, the business.

I had wanted to experiment with painting movement and the business of life in public spaces, but I have obviously not been able to due to the corona virus. So I will look at the busy activities of home life, trying to experiment with some movement. I will to go back to painting, revisiting the repetitive activity of life. I think there is more to develop here keeping in mind rhythms, and time melting into itself, and the layering of these regular everyday activities. Are they ritualistic? Do they anchor us? Is there more to these "non- being" moments that we pay so little attention to?

I have been thinking about trying to capture movement in a single image. I have found looking at Frank Selby's drawings really fascinating and clever. I have also been looking into Etienne-Jules Marey, and his photography, and the movements of the futurists. I wanted to experiment further with this movement, and have found layering with tracing paper really useful, so I wanted to experiment further with the tracing paper and images.

I tried printing some of my images onto tracing paper to see if I could capture the movement of my husband doing the washing up through the window. I found the effect quite interesting.

I found that with just two pieces of tracing paper you could see what was happening. Any more pages together warped the image so that it was unrecognisable.

I found the previous book by Virginia Woolf so fascinating that I also wanted to read more of her work. On a radio interview that I heard, about the philosopher Berger, there was a suggested reading list, and "Moments of Being" by Virginia Woolf was on there. I loved reading about her "Philosophy" on life; moments of "being" and moments of "non-being." And the non-being moments are like cotton wool filling the time. I also especially loved her thoughts on time, with the past and the present sliding over each other. I found these thoughts really relevant to my project.

But I have been wondering about these moments of "non-being," and I imagine that washing and cleaning come into many of those moments. I was thinking about how unimportant they feel, and yet they underpin our lives. I cannot help but feel that the layers of meals, washing, cleaning, over time have become reassuring and ritualistic as well as necessary. They remind me of Idris Khan's layers of photographs. Idris Khan talks about his childhood and the regular prayer times and rituals he and his family took part in and that this may show up in his work. When I look at some of his work, particularly the structures, I find that the layering effect has created a new encompassing object, almost like a nest, woven, surrounding and engulfing, and important.

I am getting quite obsessed with these windows! I have been photographing them and recording the light that falls in the diamond shapes on my wall or floor. I have been filming the shadow of the tree outside my window blowing in the wind. I wanted to try to print some of these images onto tracing paper to layer them. I managed to do this for the image below, but was stopped from further experimentation as I ran out of the tracing paper.

I have been reading more of Hannah Arendt's book, "The Human Condition," and " The Everyday," Documents of contemporary Art edited by Stephen Johnstone. I have been thinking more about what makes the everyday. I have come to think that everyone's everyday looks different. There are things that are similar- we all need to eat, be clean, and interact with people, but how this is done will differ from person to person. I wonder if, however we live our everyday, it always consists of rhythms, and is always shaped by what has come before; how we have been conditioned to think and live.

I have shown my work to some of my friends and family. It has been good to get some feedback from them and also from my tutors. The pieces that most people seem interested in are the denim patchwork pieces- the diamond window, and the Everyday sculpture. From the denim diamond window piece, the feedback was about the texture and colour of the faded jeans giving a really strange effect, almost as if they were painted or were textured like a piece of bark. Also, the photograph of this piece was interesting to people and it was suggested that this could potentially be a piece of work in itself.

I think people thought the everyday sculpture interesting, strange and amusing. The pasta machine handle made people smile. People also talked about the time captured in the worn jeans but also in the work done to patch them together.

 I have received good feedback from my photographs of light from the window. I have become more interested in taking photographs and hope to continue with more experimenting in this way.