Kate Studley

The idiom “time stands still for no one” means that time continues inexorably, no matter what happens, it doesn't stop for anyone. 

The research component of this project aims to reveal how young people today experience time in 2025, how their daily lives are structured by anticipation, uncertainty, emotional saturation, and the embodied rhythms of contemporary life. By presenting these expressions of lived temporality, the project invites the audience to reconsider their own temporal experience. Following phenomenological theory, the work opens a space for viewers to sense how time is continually shaped by the intertwining of body, memory, and world. It encourages reflection not only on how time is remembered from youth, but on how the present moment is always already thick with traces of the past and orientations toward the future.
 

The first activity involved simple drawing tasks to explore the perception of duration. Participants were asked to draw continuously, first for four minutes, and then for thirty seconds without counting or measuring, stopping only when they felt the time had passed. Results revealed that time often felt slower for them; for example, their four-minute drawings actually lasted around eight minutes.

It was also notable how this quickly became a shared sense of time within the group, as participants influenced one another. This highlighted how social interactions are an integral part of our individual awareness of time.

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These drawings were then set in pine resin. By doing so, it sought to convey the idea of ‘fossilising’ a specific moment in time as experienced by an individual. Each moment is unique; repeating the task would never produce the same outcome because the lived experience continually shapes perception.​

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