05 Aug Twenty Four

As I’ve moved away – spent more time in the studio, more time in the city, more time outside – the apartment and the tree become small. Footnotes in a diary not kept on paper. It will be one space amongst dozens of other places. The home of my childhood, gabled and scented with freshly mown grass and washing, it’s border outlined with the hundreds of trees my parents planted in the first weeks. My own home where my girls grew up, every living thing planted by us, fruit trees and blue flowers humming with bees. A creaky floored and lonely farmhouse on the outskirts of Lismore, with its round bat-filled fig tree surrounded by cows and prickly pears. A tiny terrace in Paddington with a kitchen full of nursing students, a room upstairs at the back only just big enough for me and a scraggly bonsai tree. So many places that layer meaning and shift my expectations for what home is. What makes a home? If I count up my homes this place makes maybe 24.

I once worked for a company in London compiling data from surveys. Not a very good job, mostly data entry and wandering about in the very early days of internet chat rooms, but I enjoyed the spreadsheets. Tiny squares of possibilities. The comfortable organisation of data. The data entry was easy and I was efficient, giving me hours to chat and to play with the data – making charts, writing tiny bits of code, shortcuts to do some of my job for me.

Could I take the data from the landscape, enter it into small discrete packages and extrapolate new images from it? Line it up in some way, count it, organise it, weight it, find patterns? If I make a spreadsheet of the landscape what might it look like? My google maps says I barely left this landscape in a hundred days. My migraine tracker says I slept more than an adult should find necessary. This digital tracking can be compiled, made into graphs, official and clean, or made into tiny artworks, made more manageable. I painted one wash of a resiny looking green for each hour I was there, building up to a licorice black for the days when I left only to take the dog or the kids for a walk.

Maybe this small hand-sized grid isn’t enough. It’s too contained. I started cutting out bookmarks for each day, something to slide into an unwritten diary, to mark an uneventful day. Each one ruled into 24 hours. 24 hours in one day. Every day. It seems impossible that some days so much can happen and then other days, nothing. If I take one hundred days from our first day of isolation how much nothing was there? I carried them around with me for a bit, shuffling them, letting them exist with me. If I soak the paper in ink from the tree – 12 hours, 18 hours, 23 hours, 24 hours, it will darken the longer I spent there. And then what? Will this mark in some way the wasted hours? A litmus test of nothing. The marks could also show the hours slept – the paper dipped up to the mark in poppy seed ink.