shadow tracings

April/May 2021, white chalk

Shadow Tracings was a project I worked on at the beginning of the pandemic when I felt artistically and emotionally drained. This project is mainly focused on impermanence and temporality and I connected it to the new experience of quarantining. At the moment, it was a simple and mindless project that allowed me to practice my line work and explore pattern and shape. As long as I was creating, that was all that mattered at the time. I used white chalk to trace the shadows cast on my sidewalk. As I kept working on it I could see how much the sunlight and shadows were changing in seconds, making me reflect on how fast and unnoticed time passes especially at the beginning of the pandemic. It became an abstracted documentation of time, one that was temporary and would eventually fade away. I thought about authorship; are these really my drawings if the sun is casting the shadows itself? Eventually I turned this concept into a project of going out hourly throughout the day and photographing the tracing I did and the new shadow that cast over it. This helped me mentally as I had to get out of bed every hour to work on the project, making it therapeutic. Each hour I added a new tracing and kept going until the sunset. I composed these in a way where you could see the visible changes quickly and easily rather than waiting over the span of a day.