The title refers to Henri Bergson’s concept of time (la durée) as both subjective and personal; that time is lived and experienced. With this in mind, I chose to explore time through a year of food preparation, using my kitchen cutting boards as plates that make abstract mark-making imagery. Four sets of three plates each are divided into the seasons: Spring with fish preparation in chartreuse green, Summer with meat on crimson, Autumn with cheese, a yellow print on violet paper and winter with how to cut both fruit & vegetable as a white print on rich blue.

 

Quotes from literature present each season (on watermarked paper meant to suggest a calendar), and further quotations amplify the process of each type of food preparation.

 

From this starting-point, I move on to other forms of knife use that could be used to define or ‘feel' time, whether paper cuts, self-cutting, or scarification, etc. and these texts offer objective, personal, or poetic information in layouts that are suggestive of the expressiveness of the cutting board prints themselves. A range of fonts and sizes were utilized, referencing the variety of knives & meals those cuts were made.

 

Literary quotes are from Hans Christian Anderson, Matsui Basho, Jorge Luis Borges, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Janet Flanner, Franz Kafka, Etgar Keret, Alan Lightman, George RR Martin, István Örkény, Plutarch, Marcel Proust, Bruno Schulz, and Wallace Stevens. The other texts are both my own and from online websites.