I wake and it’s already bright out, sun spilling on the white rooftop making it look like a blanket of snow.
The first two durations are tiny. I could barely light the second with the first without scorching my fingers. Once lit, I watch the flame. At any moment they could topple and burn through the circle. So I start my day tending.
With the third, urgency faded but I could still do no more than record the shape of this duration with bluepea dye.
There’s a heaviness in my core, a strain in my shoulders, I wonder if diluted coffee can really wake me. There’s plenty of time when I finish my meal, so I open Ruth Ozeki’s book.
An old nun Jiko says, “If you start snapping your fingers now and continue snapping 98,463,077 times without stopping, the sun will rise and set… and you will experience the truly intimate awareness of knowing exactly how you spent every single moment of a single day of your life.”
In the circle, there are no drips. The only visible accumulation are the tiny grains of soot that appear when I brush on another layer of bluepea dye. Some consumed part of the duration dissolve and smudge into faint streaks.
In every moment, we experience layers of time, woven from memories of the past and anticipation of the future. These layers influence how we experience the present. Now, I am sitting here writing at 9:10pm, but I am also conscious of:
The move I made from Singapore to Vancouver last week.
The two week quarantine I am in, of which ten days have passed.
The next parcel that will arrive via DHL, which is projected to take 2 days.
The finite but unknown span of my life.
The last time I received a voice message or text from my friend Asch, who I usually hear from daily.
The move I made from Atlanta to Singapore three years ago, which made me feel just as foreign as I do now.
Some of these temporal layers have no known durations, some of them straddle across different spans of chronological time. But together, these shifting times form the ground of all my experiences.
In contemporary life, we are expected to divide time into clinical blocks of hours and minutes. We are so accustomed to converting time units into wages or prices, we constantly measure our experience of the present against the rigid divisions of hours and minutes to determine our own ‘productivity’ and value.
Because I feel that the linear and clinical way of dividing time into hours and minutes falls far short of understanding what the value of time truly is to us, I’ve been experimenting with making objects that can be used to measure and inhabit time differently.
I think of these as experiments. Like I’m inventing clocks and working out the kinks. Except how I evaluate these clocks is not their mechanical precision but how they influence the way time can be experienced or visualised. Right now I’m working with candles because before the invention of pendulum clocks, candles were widely used across many parts of Asia to measure time.
I’m also interested in the heat generated by the burning of the wick. The only basic law of physics that distinguishes the past from the future is that: if nothing else around it changes, heat cannot pass from a cold body to a hot one. None of the other elemental laws of physics distinguish between the past and future.
We are expected to divide time into clinical blocks of hours and minutes, but that doesn’t really allow us to understand the value of time to us. I’ve been trying to make objects that can be used to measure and inhabit time, but I’m not interested in mechanical precision.
The only basic law of physics that distinguishes the past from the future is that: if nothing else around it changes, heat cannot pass from a cold body to a hot one. None of the other elemental laws of physics distinguish between the past and future.
Time moves at different speeds in different places
Times moves at different speeds depending on how fast you’re moving.
Most of the universe consists of times that neither the future, present or past relative to us.
How do I touch what is too abstract and large to really understand or experience?
Thinking about: rituals and magic (the appeal and discomfort of that), sandplay – a form of play therapy often used with children to access the subconscious mind
I made this divination tablet from porcelain to use with beeswax. For this first session, I asked my mother whether she had any questions about the past or future.
She wanted to know what the next five years might look like. I arranged the pieces according, she chose a candle location, and after the process we interpreted the plate together.
I do have audio recordings of our entire conversation, but it’s very candid, and I’m not sure if it’s an essential component of this.
I also struggled with duration for this. This process took a long time – almost 40 mins. Although I am interested in slowing time, I’m not sure where to go with this length of time yet. Maybe I will make much shorter candles, maybe I will experiment with other ephemeral materials to denote time.
When I edited the video for uploading, I did cut out a lot of parts and fast-forward a few other parts. But that felt so wrong, to seek the moment when exciting changes happen to the wax for visual satisfaction.
I was drawn to both the idea and visuals of tending to / take care of the flame. You can’t just light a candle and just walk away in this set up because it might blow out. Unlike time on a digital clock, which we can just leave running and running, paying it no mind as we scroll online or jump from task to task, as though we had endless time to use.
Experimenting with the burn time of candles in relation to length, weight and density/thickness of wick
25 mins11 mins
These wax stains as concrete visualization of a duration of time. Though we constantly measure it, and feel short of it, it’s hard for us to really grasp time.
Perhaps these clocks keep track of a particular activity (e.g. all the conversations I have with someone). So that the accumulation of wax shows all the time I’ve spent on something, with my attention focused. Instead of distracted, scattered, which is how a lot of us usually experience modern time.
Inks made from beetroot, bluepea flower, coffee, vinegar on rice paper and watercolour paper
Thinking about where my materials come from. I’m captured by these two points:
The yellow of beeswax comes from the accumulation of pollen over time as the worker bees chew wax to build hives.
It takes the lifetime production of 2 – 3 worker honey bees just to produce 1 gram of wax.
This feels powerful and significant, especially while I read Braiding Sweetgrass and think about materials as gifts from nature.
We are often so detached from the sources of our material world. We think of materials as things contained in plastic boxes with price labels, rather than as matter with connections to plants and animals around us.
Making holders that could gather and divert the flow of melted wax. I’m wondering if these can be draw tools of some kind, marks that record.
Made this form while thinking about Rovelli’s diagrams of time structures:
A good friend of mine was leaving Singapore. It seemed as good a time as any to make more of the wick-candles.
This time they turned out wilder for some reason, they felt more animate to me. I have been thinking a lot about the magic readings. They resonated with me in a way I never expected.
I’ve been thinking about those ideas, I just didn’t know they were could be called magic.
Here are a few lines from What Lenin Teaches Us About Witchcraft, by Oxana Timofeeva and Reclaiming Animism, by Isabelle Stengers.
What makes slight-of-hand magic possible is “the way the sense themselves have, of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly”.
Our millieu entices us to feel that we bear the high responsibility to determine what “really” exists and what does not. It is a milieu that is ruled by the power of judgmental critique.
Scientists are infected, of course, as are all those who accept their authority to decide what objectively exists. But also infected might be those who would claim to be animists, if they affirm that rocks “really” have souls or intentions, like humans.
A poisoned milieu must be reclaimed. So must many of our words, those that – like ‘animism’ and ‘magic’ – carry with them the power to take us hostage: do you “really” believe in…?
The main source of her magic is her firm belief in herself, which she perhaps acquires at precisely her worst moments of loss and catastrophe.
Neo-pagan witches call their own craft “magic”: naming it so, they say, is itself an act of magic, since the discomfort it creates helps us notice the smoke in our nostrils.
I started rereading In The Order of Time. Made these small drawings to try to understand the structure of time as Rovelli describes it.
I seem to take pleasure in discovering over and over my perceptions and assumptions about the world around me are inaccurate. Amongst many other surprising properties, I read that:
Time varies based on how fast I’m moving, how high up in the air I am.
Past, present and future only makes sense in the immediate bubble around us. Much of the universe is filled with events that are neither the past, present nor future, relative to us.
Heat is the only thing in physics equations that distinguishes between past and future, as heat can only pass from a point of higher temperature to a point of lower temperature. Every other equation else is reversible, the past and future makes no difference.
Unlike the many candles I made previously, the shapes of these candles were determined by their internal structure.
I liked that I couldn’t predict how they would burn until they were lit. I purposely created conundrums where it seemed like the flame might have to choose one path or the other. It seemed fitting of the characteristics of time I was reading about in Rovelli’s book.
I liked how they looked like small roots to be used in herbal spells when held in my hands.
I always struggle with documentation.
On one hand it seems essential for ephemeral processes. On the other I find it extremely challenging to not get caught up in the image I’m creating and just pay attention to the present moment.
I couldn’t resist taking one photo while burning this first one. But for most of the time I took detailed annotations on the flame size and melting speed instead:
Then I used the information above to redraw in a more streamlined form.
Melting old candles from my last show to measure and watch time pass by. Photographed every time after use. I recorded everything I did and my thoughts on time whenever I lit the candles.
Like phases of the moon I thought.
I thought of sending these candles to people in different places, time-zones and asking them to record everything they did while they lit the candles too
Perhaps I still will. But I feel I need more time to experience what this ritual is for me
When I wake up at two or three in the morning, I sometimes sat in the dark on my worktable in the living room making these large charcoal drawings by candlelight.
I listened to music, draw moving my limbs everywhere. Almost like a trance. Trying to capture, shadow, passage of time.
They looked so different in the light of day. I didn’t want to focus on how the image looked it. I just wanted it to be the natural outcome of recording, recording time? But sometimes it felt strange. I wondered if I should be recording something more concrete.
