2016

A long dura­tional stu­dio work where the artist lived with­out sight for sev­en days and nights. Repeat­ed­ly tran­scrib­ing five sen­tences the image cre­at­ed is with­out any visu­al reference.

7 days is also a box set of 3 artist books and a folio of prints that doc­u­ments the project.

Artist state­ment -

“The idea of going ​‘under’ or with­out images fas­ci­nat­ed me. I had read of yogis spend­ing years in com­plete dark­ness and psy­chol­o­gists run­ning light depri­va­tion stud­ies but for me the ques­tion was — what land­scapes are avail­able to the artist when they are only giv­en an inter­nal view for sev­en days?

Bio­log­i­cal­ly speak­ing the absence of day­light trig­gers large hor­mone imbal­ances in the pineal glad locat­ed in the cen­tre of the brain. This gland nor­mal­ly releas­es mela­tonin which is the hor­mone that reg­u­lates sleep — and with this out of bal­ance — you will quick­ly find your­self oper­at­ing out­side of con­ven­tion­al time…

…what struck me though was how I relied on my sense of sight for a sense of body. Sim­ple things like the bridge of my nose, or my arms, actu­al­ly play a mas­sive role in defin­ing a sense of self and once these are out of the pic­ture the very def­i­n­i­tion of ​‘you’ sig­nif­i­cant­ly changes shape, so much so in fact, that when peo­ple came to drop off food, the sen­sa­tion was much more akin to some­one walk­ing into my head as opposed to walk­ing into the room… ”