LARA BOWEN
CALENDAR SYNESTHESIA
Calendar synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon where individuals experience the visualisation of time, often associating months or days with colours, shapes, or spatial layouts.
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I have always seen time in these specific visual ways and assumed everyone else did too. I only discovered in 2019 that there was a name for this and that only 1-2% of people are believed to have brains that work in this way.
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As an artist, it's a wonderful challenge to represent my perceptions through my paintings - to convey the abstract and immersive imagery of my own calendar synesthesia. Units of time are seen in various ways in my mind's eye; years are hoops that loop around me with shapes and colours denoting events, wider and denser during busy periods, and crosses mark birthdays. Months and weeks are more linear but equally variable and dependent on colour, density, and form.
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I began attempting to extract my mental calendars in 2019 by creating visual representations of years, on square boards. Then in 2020, this idea extended to my Lockdown Collection project - exploring our links with colour and emotions, and language. Once I had established the specific colours and tones associated with the feelings and vocabulary we were all experiencing during the pandemic, a new idea emerged.
Combining colour and calendar synesthesia I started plotting a month of my life at a time using my new palette of colours. The striped painting featured is 'February 2021', a very important month for me, in which I journaled and painted the happenings and emotions I experienced each day.
Moving through the month from left to right, the length of each day from top to bottom of each row, with the white areas being sleep, this produced an abstract composition with deep significance.
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The original painting is 1m x 1m and is now available for sale. I have also made it available in the following reproductions:
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Size: 65 x 65 cm printed on canvas with archival inks
Hand embellished with touches of gold, framed in white wood
Edition of 28 - one for every day of the month of February
Signed and numbered verso
£500 plus P&P
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Size: 50 x 50 cm incl. white border printed with archival on paper
Edition of 50 signed and numbered
Signed and numbered on the front
£190 plus P&P unframed, shipped rolled
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Please allow two weeks for delivery as all items are printed / embellished / framed to order.
