recovery (2020-22)
This collection looks into how we experience time through repetitiveness and routine and how these can apply to meditative exercises for mental health. It compiles series of drawings where time and states of mind are being recorded by drawing lines on paper by hand, again and again.
As the hand draws without a ruler and repeats this action, no line can ever be same or ‘perfect’: every tiny shake of the hand ‘writes’ each line in every moment, making it unique and looking almost like a cardiogram or encephalograph of moods and thoughts. Hundreds of moments are being ‘recorded’ in this way, and together they bring new dimensions with the overall textures, waves and rhythms.
There is one rule that focus on each repetitive action and ensures its therapeutic effect: the lines must never touch eachother, no matter how close they might get: each moment is unique and precious.
The work process is very detailed but also free, painstaking but also meditative, quiet but also intense, focused but also risky, using vulnerable media such as ink from frixion pens (a type of ink that disappears with heat and friction) and paper. In this way, the awareness of time passing, the ephemeral nature of everything and that nothing can ever repeat the same is intensified as part of a personal technique that has proved to be healing.
recovery V (2022)
frixion pens on A3 paper (29.7x39 cm)
This project was realised under a constructed routine: 3 drawings were made for the same weekday in the span of several weeks until all 7 days of the week were recorded 3 times each. So, there are 3 drawings for 3 different Sundays, 3 for 3 different Mondays and so on, totalling 21 drawings, each one unique. Additionally, as part of the ‘routine’, each drawing was done in two sessions starting on the same times for each weekday by adding lines from the middle in opposite directions and showing the exact date and times.
The 21 drawings are in 3 rows of 7 (each row corresponding to a different day of the week), and the viewer is invited to stop and look each drawing closely, to feel each moment of its creation and the healing process that it represents and, perhaps, remember and contemplate on their own experience at the time that each drawing was made.
recovery IV (2021)
frixion pens on A3 paper (29.7x42 cm)
from top left:
wanting, breathe, equation,
possibility, distance within, rain,
wanderer, nostalgia, intimate encounter,
flow, invasion, life within
Haris Kittos
recovery III - 120 times 7 (2020)
frixtion pen on 7 sheets of A3 paper, 207.9x42 cm
A planned, time-based process: lines-threads, drawn for 2 hours on the same time of the day, for 7 consecutive days. The movement of the hand while drawing is ‘recorded’ (documented) every day in the same time slot, like a ‘psychogram’ (or even a handwritten ‘encephalograph’), conveying changes in mind states. On the 7th day, the 7 sheets are joined and become a horizontal landscape - a vibrating space.
click on images for Instagram view
morning
afternoon
recovery II (2020)
marker pen and frixion pen on A4 paper (21x29.7 cm)
from top left:
'castaway 1-11' (red), 'eyes open 1-10' (blue)
recovery I (2020)
frixion pen on A4 paper (21x29.7 cm)
