Thanks to Megan Driving Hawk, I recently joined Kinship Photography Collective, “a global community of practice that invites photographers (of all levels) to deepen their empathy, intimacy, and connection with the natural world and with each other through collaborative creative projects.” I feel it’s what online community should be: welcoming, engaging, focused, active, thought- and feeling-provoking. They have weekly zoom meetings open to the public as well as “practice groups” that explore an annual theme/topic in more intimate groups of six-ish. This year’s theme/topic is Time. This has been broken down into Deep Time, Inhabited Time, and Time-out-of-Time. As you can imagine, the thoughts and ideas are boundless.

I joined a practice group lead by the wonderful, talented Dale Rio during June and July. Our group was delving into Time in Concept and Scale. The women were amazing. Storytellers with big, open hearts. Talented. Giving with advice, suggestions, productive critique. For my part, I wanted to stay connected to a project I’m working on that’s focusing on LIGHT as a subject, rather than a tool of illumination. Here’s how the first explorations began. As usual, with research and looking for poems!

Just one of the many reflections on time from the Marginalian: “‘James Gleick atomizes time in his wonderful inquiry into the human dream of time-travel to suggest that time is just the name we give to our perception of change: ‘When the future vanishes into the past so quickly, what remains is a kind of atemporality, a present tense in which temporal order feels as arbitrary as alphabetical order. We say that the present is real—yet it flows through our fingers like quicksilver. It might be fair to say that all we perceive is change — that any sense of stasis is a constructed illusion. Every moment alters what came before. We reach across layers of time for the memories of our memories.’”

Light is Time
“Your very first word was light. With that Time was made.” — Rilke

How do I think about time as it relates to my themes of change and impermanence?
Decay, Erosion, Different Perspectives, Remaking, Rebirth

How does time change light itself?
Lightens, Darkens, Lengthens, Shortens, Obscures, Reveals

How do I show these concepts of time in my abstract images?

Different Textures, Different Finishes (matte with gloss), Layered Movement, Physical Layers, Layered in Postprocessing, Edges Decaying or Tearing Away, Putting Image Back into the Environment to Decay and Fade.

Then I found this link to a story about how physicists had captured light moving through imaginary time … imaginary time?! Down the rabbit hole I went straight into Quantum Theory. Oh yeah.

Not that I’m qualified to explain the quantum theories of Einstein and Hawking, but I was stoked to create an artist’s interpretation of one of Hawking’s and James Hartle’s theories about the beginning of time:

Instead of time being a straight line with a definitive beginning (the Big Bang) and end, Hawking proposed that space-time is a closed, finite surface without any edges or boundaries.

I love this too from “Braiding Sweet Grass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer where she recounts this Native American creation story: “Some people say that time is a river into which we can step but once as it flows in a straight path to the sea. But Nanabozho’s people know time as a circle. But in circular time, Nanabozho’s stories are both history and prophecy, stories for a time yet to come. If time is a turning circle, there is a place where history and prophecy converge — the footprints of First Man lie on the path behind us and on the path ahead.”

I’ll leave you with a bit of my prose.

If Time a loop
no beginning or end,
expanding through space
or multi universe,
Then throw me
onto that clock
expanding,
traveling time …
Not to change history
but to see you
One More Time.
And if I found you
wouldn’t I want to stay where we both are?

Time in Concept and Scale

Deep Time Resonance