Alina Wang

Napping on a cloudy day (2023)
Video, 10 minutes, 59 seconds
Cyanotype on pillow

This project emerged from a mixture of thoughts I’ve been having about time and how we keep time; how we live in relationship to the sun and the earth; and rest as a material.

In an essay titled “Earth-based vs. capital-based time,” Juniper Wong writes, “under capitalism, time is a yoke. Linear time is a capitalist sorting structure to point us only to deadlines and dead ends, instead of release or renewal. Linear time is a lie to make us forget our natural ways of being…time as it stands now, is a site of struggle.”

What if we lived our lives based on how much sunlight we got each day?

Cyanotype is a cameraless photographic process that dates back to the 1840s. It’s a process of making images/records/documents that feels magical to me, like alchemy. You become attuned to the sun and how you are positioned facing the sun. Light-sensitive iron salts – potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate – are applied to a surface. An image is created through contact printing, by placing a negative or object on the surface. When the iron salts are exposed to sunlight, an insoluble blue dye is formed, known as Prussian blue. To develop the image, simply wash with water.

“Making a cyanotype is a collaboration with the sun and weather…it’s a meteorological event.” (Kaitlin Pomerantz)

To think through the materials of sunlight, time, and rest, and to collaborate with the earth, I decided to make a cyanotype on a pillowcase of me taking a nap.

When the time came for me to take my nap, I found that I was forced to be still and patient, and to let go of my expectations. It became less about the resulting cyanotype, and more about the journey of actually taking a nap.

I laid my head down on the pillow. I doubted whether the pillowcase would hold a visual record of my nap in the way that I wanted. I worried about whether there was enough light coming through my windows – it was cloudier than I had hoped. I worried about whether I would have enough time to edit my video properly. I worried and waited and wondered.

And then, I fell asleep.