While reading about how to tell the age of a stone, I discovered that the language used to date a rock resonated with the my experience being a new parent.
Terms like daughter product, nuclei don’t get tired, the staircase of time, half life and 100% pure parent appeared to be directly referring to the business of raising my child, but were actually being used to describe the process of estimating the amount of time since any particular piece of stone came into being.
Half life is a bit like the will to continue an arts practice using two 45 minute ‘nap’ blocks each day. Nuclei don’t get tired taunts me – reminding me of my human weakness as I succumb to fatigue at the end of each day, and remove previously deposited material, well, if that isn’t directly referring to the constant deposits of excrement I deal with several times a day …!
Looking at stones, rocks and pebbles in detail is a one way to counter the minutiae of any given day – which looks just like yesterday, and the day before.
While we may be able to decipher the age of a stone to the closest few thousand years, I have found that the blocks of time in any given hour, day, week or month with a child are dwelled upon with intensity. ‘25 and a half weeks’, ‘How long did she sleep?’ ‘She’s 14 months’.
All this alongside the constant monitoring of the growth of my daughter against her age – her weight and height measured precisely to ensure she (and I) are reaching the desired milestones in life.
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This work was made as part of my Artist Residency in Motherhood, where the imposed restrictions of time, space and material choice which come with having a child, are used as creative limitations rather than obstacles to overcome.
