The length of day

The length of day was made during a residency at PADA in Portugal. At the PADA site, everything spoke to me about the length of day and in turn, about work and industry. The residency building was previously a jute factory, and the starting point for the work was the intensity of the shadow cast by the building onto the road. The constraints of the process were inspired by the conditions of factory production: I recorded the position of the sun using sand and a tool I created for the work, labouring to capture its position on the hour, persisting for eight hours, becoming a kind of machine for the process. The markings on the road were transient, temporary, disturbed by traffic and the wind even as I was making them. For the duration of the work, I was chasing time, and it was constantly escaping – slipping away, like the sand.

The work is not its outcome – it is a process that reveals something that I can’t know or predict in advance. The process revealed how sand feels like time – impossible to control or hold onto, always on the go, not sticking around. It surfaced questions about the efforts we make and their meaning. How do we measure the labour of a day? What does work offer us? What is a day worth? Why should one person’s time be worth more than another’s? How long do our efforts last? By the end of the residency, three weeks later, the work had almost completely disappeared.