Unfinished MA

I started the process of finishing the MA by completing my half-done Counter-mapping project. I had originally started by developing an idea based on exploring children’s understandings of ‘Home’ using maps of the dens that they built. When the COVID 19 pandemic started and the restrictions of lockdown came in it meant everything had to change. My mental health plummeted and I ended up working on a crocheted piece of work that measured the time my partner and I spent shielding in that first lockdown. It didn’t have a name at first but over time I have come to think of it as the Timepiece.

The timepiece was a vulnerable work. One of neurosis and adhd and coping and control-seeking and drive.

“Do you sometimes feel driven, as if by a motor?”

It was a return to the scrap-tics of my degree and there was comfort in that. Talks of reworking my previous project idea to allow for the new restrictions of the pandemic were performative. I couldn’t have organised something that was so far from myself at that time. The level of fragmentation I was experiencing meant that I needed an anchor of ‘severe interest’ to keep me with a project. The timepiece was done in severe self-interest. A pass time, a fidgit, a constant that allowed me to return to the present over and over.

It felt more like magic than any spell I’d made so far. A daunting, incoming storm cloud kind of magic. Bleakness and impending doom. A crowd of cawing ravens circling in the sky. A solid line of text in a diary that would go on for as long as the ‘event’.

During a tutorial DM asked me to document the work and experiment with its form. As a very long piece the possibilities for display seemed endless and a few options were mentioned. When it came to actually starting the documentation, anything I thought of felt a bit frivolous. An idea I had had had been to lay the timepiece around the boundary of the house and garden, but the idea of putting it on the floor outside seemed disrespectful. I was uncomfortable with the feeling and ended up putting the timepiece in a shoe box that eventually made its way to the attic.