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“This body of work is a woodcut which functions as both a series of prints and a puzzle. Each individual tile could be seen as faces of a die, with pips denoting the numbers 5, 6, 11 or 6.
I came to this numerical sequence via a conversation with one of the primary school students I work with, who brought it to my attention that your birthday may or may not fall on certain days of the week due to leap years.
This suggestion, so banal and yet so curious, compelled me to map the leap years (eg. 2024, 2028, 2032, etc) to ascertain on which days my birthday would fall. It turned out that it would take 28 years for the birthday in question to have fallen on each day of the week, but in intervals of every 5, 6, 11, and 6 years (eg. if it is on a Friday, the next time it falls on a Friday will be either 5, 6, 11 or 6 years away, respectively).
There were numerous takeaways from this realisation. I am currently 28 years old so only by now has my birthday fallen on every day of the week. I have also been considering the astrological notion of the Saturn return which is said to occur in an individual’s life every 27-29 years. Natal charts more broadly take 28 year intervals as significant and indeed the Gregorian calendar too reflects the significance of approximations of multiples of 7 & 4.
Often I find patterns in things and don’t know what to attribute them to, but they resonate and tick away in the clock motions of the mind. I imagine this is the role of ritual, of spirituality, of art and artifice; the compulsion to offer ourselves up. It all has to amount to something.
Time is unstoppable; perpetual motion. I try to remember my grandpa telling me that we are ‘human-beings’ rather than ‘human-doings’ when I get lost in search of time.’”