A Year in Light: A Practice of Encounter

A Year in Light is a durational photographic project structured around a daily encounter with morning light. Each day at sunrise, I photograph the same bathroom window. The setting is deliberately ordinary. The light shifts. Some days a small gesture enters the frame, often a hand or arm, registering presence. Other days, the window remains unoccupied.

Every image is paired only with its date. Repetition establishes a temporal framework in which subtle variations accumulate: shifts in season, atmosphere, bodily state, and attention. Over time, duration itself becomes the primary subject.

The project draws from Virginia Woolf’s sense of consciousness as something stitched from lived moments, and from Agnes Martin’s disciplined repetition and commitment to stillness as a condition for clarity. Like Martin, the work relies on recurrence rather than spectacle. The image is not forced. It is awaited. The gesture, when it appears, is investigative rather than performative, a brief check-in with the body and a question of how it is possible to be here today.

While many light-based works locate transcendence in vast or dramatic landscapes, A Year in Light situates contemplative rigor within an intimate domestic interior. The bathroom, a private and often overlooked space, becomes a site of sustained attention. Rather than rejecting monumentality, the work reframes it, proposing that seriousness and duration need not rely on scale, spectacle, or heroic geography. The domestic is neither incidental nor decorative. It is deliberate. The sacred emerges through repetition, return, and embodied presence, held within a space long associated with privacy and daily ritual and rarely afforded sustained contemplative weight.

Historically, luminous domestic interiors have been sites where women were observed. Here, the vantage point shifts. The body is not presented for viewing but becomes the author of its own encounter with light. Photographing is not display but contact, a daily act of self-witnessing enacted from within.

Each dated image stands alone, yet resolves fully only within accumulation. In its intended installation form, the photographs are printed on translucent fabric and suspended within a darkened room, creating a three-dimensional field of repetition with subtle irregularity, a grid loosened into space. Minimal stitching will link select panels, referencing time’s connective labor without imposing linear progression. There is no fixed focal point or prescribed path. Visitors move at their own pace and direction, encountering the images without hierarchy or a singular vantage from which the work resolves.

At its core, A Year in Light is a record of encounter: light and body, self and world.