Tears of Waiting

Material Explorations: Touching Time

10 - 23 February 2020

STACKS Projects

Touching Time through the activity of tearing strips of fabric was a focused meditation on how the cyclical structure of lived time comes into tension with the order of linear time. This tension creates both individual as well as societal conflicts which may also result in psycho-pathological phenomena. As an example, depression, anxiety and burnout syndromes. 

Daily life is the sphere of the mundane and taken for granted; it is governed by sedimented patterns of behaviour that are often not subject to conscious thought but carried out in a habitual, semi-automatic nature. In the performative work, Tears of Waiting, the act of tearing strips of fabric is an unexciting action that takes up time with no real purpose or need. However, the meditative process brings an awareness to the body. Both for the artist and the viewer. Here action, emotion and time all meet in the body. This awareness of the body is just the awareness of passing time. The viewer is waiting for something to happen. But it does not. Instead the artist reveals the experience of time related to the experience of self that unfolds over time. An awareness to our innate cyclical time that we have lost touch with, and need to reconnect with in order to care for nature and the world we live in. 

1000 Tears of Waiting is the result of the performative work Tears of Waiting. During the durational activity my awareness of waiting developed. The cultural factor in a  woman’s sense of time; more generally speaking, women were historically trained to wait: to wait until they were allowed to appear: to appear in the public sphere, to appear among men, to appear prior to men, to speak in front of men, to speak before a man speaks, to have the first or the last word, and so on, and so on. Waiting, however, is a fundamental element of temporality. It is duration in the temporal field. It means a certain time quality. It means a different attitude to time, a different sort of interaction with time, and it also means a different "knowledge" of time.[1]

30mts of fabric took 3hrs to strip. I was waiting for someone to visit and acknowledge me, talk to me, see me, like me; the list goes on and on into infinity. The body has its own sense of time and through waiting we feel time and experience time. The body is full of knowledge and it is about time to listen and reclaim our intuitive way of being in the world. 

Image credit Document Photography