What is the shape of time?

This body of work is from our series that explores the perception of time as something non-linear.

An ever-present field in which past, present, and future co-exist simultaneously. I am interested in the tension between the flow of lived experience and its recorded traces. We move through time moment by moment, yet when we try to recall or document it, everything collapses into a single plane: a memory, an image, a headline, or even just a single a receipt.

One strand of the project takes video footage and breaks it apart into still frames, arranging them together as a grid. Each frame is unique, yet fundamentally the same, containing nearly identical information. Like our daily experiences that feel different while we are inside them, but later blur into repetition. Over this grid, the full video plays again, layering time as both a whole (a wave) and as discrete instants (particles). The work asks the viewer to hold two realities simultaneously: time as continuous flow, and time as incremental slices.

Here we have applied this approach with news broadcasts from our on going BBC World News Series. Every day we are presented with events which we (the British in this case) believe to be significant , yet which return again and again in endless cycles: conflicts, power struggles, collapses, reconstructions. The final imagery here is processed and printed through a thermal receipt printer, transforming global history into small disposable records which fundamentally degrade over time back to white paper. The receipt becomes a metaphor for how we trade our time: working hours in exchange for money, then money for goods, and always the printed record to say this is where your time went. A life reduced to transactions, quantified but not lived.

Across these works, I am asking: What is the shape of time?
Is it a line, a loop, a wave, a texture?
And how do we experience it from the inside, while always trying to document it from the outside?

The pieces invite viewers to notice the familiarity in difference, the sameness within change, and the way our experiences, no matter how vivid, often resolve into patterns which we recognise only in hindsight.

One Minute World MAY 31 2018 v6