Of a Second
2022, a suite of ten drawings, pen and ink on 638gsm Saunders Waterford paper, each 30x30cm, edition of 2 (one complete set). Photographers: Installation documentation by Ben Adams (The Lock-Up, Newcastle, Radical Slowness group exhibition); artwork documentation by Document Photography.
Light travels 1.6 x 10-35 of a metre
Lifespan of a Higgs boson
An electron travels between two atoms
Lifespan of a tau
Lifespan of a muon
A neuron in a human brain fires on impulse then returns to rest
The snap of a finger
The blink of an eye
A heartbeat
Light travels 299,792,458 metres
‘Of a Second’ is a series of ten drawings contemplating periods of time one second and below, and events that happen at this minuscule scale. Taking lead from my earlier decimal drawings such as ‘The Veil (after René Magritte’s The Lovers)’ and ‘Infinite’, the work consists of decimal numbers written by hand with pen and ink at 1mm in height. Each number is a fraction of one second, while the title indicates an event that takes place during that period of time. The series begins with the distance light travels in Planck time (5.39116 x 10-44 of a second: Planck time is the shortest possible time interval that we can measure), and continues through various events that take place during timespans below one second, including activities of subatomic particles and phenomena of the human body. The series concludes with the distance light travels in one whole second.