I say it every time, but where does it go?
This year’s overall plan was for it to look something like an aerial view of fields, a visual depiction of time and space. Each block is time taking up space, a few stitches marking the minutes that make up a life as well as a dimensional area on the cloth.
I don’t generally set out to depict ‘an event’ or anything representing what happened that day. It’s usually just a few stitches to mark the passing of that time.
It’s not meant to be a way of remembering the minutiae of daily life, but a bigger picture of the way time (mostly) passes without us even noticing. It’s the opposite of ‘wasting time’, if there can be such a thing. It’s about noticing and honouring time, because time is what allows us to be present here and now.
And really there’s no such thing as ‘now’. As soon as you’ve formed the concept of ‘now’ the moment has passed, to be replaced by another, different moment. And you can’t grasp that one either before it disappears to be replaced by another. The moments continue, if we’re lucky, for some years until they cease. Time really is all we have, from our limited human perspective. It’s days in a life, unbelievably fragile yet tenacious.
I don’t know anything about cosmic time, or astrophysics, or geographical time, but I do know time definitely seems to speed up as you get older. Stitching it down doesn’t make any difference, but I suppose it probably makes me feel a bit better about it. I still don’t know where it goes.
If you’re interested in learning how to make something similar, my online course is available here.
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I think it seems to speed up because each given amount is a smaller fraction of your life. When you’re six, summer holidays are an eternity, by the time you are 18 they end all too quickly, and by the time you’re in your fifties, you can find entire decades seem to have telescoped into a couple of weeks!
It occurs to me that your field patterns could embody time in more than one way, because field patterns in the countryside, like city plots have developed during the changing land uses of the past thousand or so years. A good landscape archaeologist can tell you astonishing things from looking at field boundaries…!
yes, I agree about the time-relative-to-age theory, makes a lot of sense. I picture a lifetime as a spiral, moving towards the centre in ever-decreasing rings.
An excellent point re field boundaries – that hadn’t occurred to me but likewise makes a great deal of sense. I often wonder how many people have stood on a particular spot over a couple of thousand years or even longer.
My kids have started to realize this concept of their day feeling long, but a week/month going by seems to them like “Already?” And my oldest, like me, loves your day by day stitching as a way to mark time 🙂
thanks so much Naomi. Amazing how time can shrink and stretch like this.
Beautiful piece as always Karen! and I admire your ability to come up with so many different stitching designs.💙💙💙
thanks so much Pam. They’re mostly variations on a handful of very basic stitches, and often just running stitch. I don’t know what I’m doing until I’ve done it, if that makes sense.
It is beautiful and always enjoy your writing
thanks so much, Mary
my very soon to begin project is basically about time.
it’s amazing how much faster it goes when you’re older. disconcerting!
Indeed! Enjoy your new beginning 🙂
Although you don’t mark events I saw the circular day and immediately thought eclipse. You are so right about time moving faster than our grasping of it.
ha, yes I think that one was the eclipse. Sometimes it does happen that way.