The Pathos of Things: A Painting and Chime Exploration of Making Time Palpable in The Everyday Encounter

Abstract

My practice-led research explores the passage of time within everyday encounters and its palpability through an installation of painting and sound. My painting practice reflects the way I attune myself to fleeting encounters and ordinary details of the everyday. Confronted by a rigid, linear understanding of time within the everyday, I turn to painting and sound to explore its malleability. Allowing process and material to mark, suspend, reenact and distil temporal experience. My paintings distil memory into images that evolve through drawing, watercolour, and oil painting, echoing how recollection shifts over time. Rather than simply documenting an experience, I re-encounter it through the process, mirroring its emotional resonance. In doing so, I attempt to hold onto something inherently ungraspable, a fleeting moment, while reshaping it through the act of painting. In my painting installation practice, I incorporate sound, particularly chimes inspired by Japan’s five o’clock chime broadcasts. These intermittent chimes offer a heightened, ephemeral moment that both disrupts and recedes, embodying the paradox at the heart of my practice: the tension between the fleeting and the enduring.