Making Time

provax

I've always been a clock watcher. I time everything. It takes 12 minutes to get from my house to the halfway landmark during my morning commute no matter which route I take. It takes 19 minutes to the same point on the way home. It takes my husband 9 minutes to shower even though he claims it takes 7. My obsessive stopwatch was taken to a new extreme when I kept a nursing log for my newborn, diligently penciling in the exact minutes he spent eating each side. I continued to update the log long after the recommended 6 weeks and now have an entire notebook filled with months of his eating habits.

Maybe that's why I'm drawn to the works of Portland printmaker Alyson Provax, who has elevated her own clock-watching obsessiveness to an art form. The letterpress prints she sells at her Etsy Shop are clever chronicles of time wasted. She writes, "The 'Time Wasting Experiments' are an ongoing series of letterpress prints I've been producing which document time wasted. These are in part inspired by tracking 'billable hours' but also come from the compulsion to always be doing things and producing objects. This series is a sort of audit of how I spend my time, but the prints could also be thought of as permission slips allowing you to spend a period of time in a wasteful way (maybe recontextualizing a private, shameful activities into something which one tries to get done in a set amount of time)."

I love the simplicity beauty of these. I want to house a collection of them in floating lacquer frames for a graphic display - perfect in a bathroom as a sly nod to the place where most of my time is wasted.

west elm floating lacquer frames

 

 

 

I love this simple arrangement. source unknown!

The casual placement of frames in this bathroom would also work well with this art. Image by Rob Fiocca from article in Canadian House and Home Magazine.