Why Slowness Matters: Art, Time, and the Spirituality of the Everyday

Four Thousand Weeks and a Different Way of Being

After a period in which my body taught me a different relationship with time (as I’ve touched on in my previous blog posts), and after losing people dear to me—I later came across one of the most interesting and unexpected books I've ever read on time management: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. His words echoed what I had already begun to live.

You can find Four Thousands Weeks on Bookshp.org

“The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for despair. It’s a cause for relief.”

We have around 4,000 weeks if we live to 80. Knowing this doesn’t make me anxious, it makes me attentive. It invites a different pace, a different gaze. It reminds me that the most radical thing I can do is to work slowly, with intention, with what is already here, to be fully present in the act, not the outcome.

Burkeman speaks not only to our obsession with productivity but also to the deep discomfort many of us feel in simply being with time, rather than mastering it. His reflections helped me articulate something that had already begun to shape my creative process: the quiet refusal to rush, to optimise, to constantly strive.

In a culture fixated on control and accumulation, there’s something defiantly peaceful in choosing to stay small, local, embodied.

This shift isn’t about doing less for the sake of minimalism, it’s about noticing more. About letting go of the need to fill every hour, every canvas, every silence. It’s about making space for care, for slowness, for the unseen work of transformation that happens beneath the surface.

Enough of striving. Enough of more. This — right here — is already everything.

Finding Meaning in Humble Materials

There is a hidden sacredness in earth-stained hands. In the remains of a fallen branch, the sand forgotten at the bottom of a coat pocket, the slowness of a gesture that asks for no explanation.

In my practice, I’ve always been drawn to what is already present. The so-called “humble” materials, to me, are neither secondary nor symbolic, they are the medium and the message. In what is overlooked or discarded, I find continuity, connection, and truth.

Soil, Rust, Ash, Water

When I work with organic materials, I choose them because they carry stories. Rust is time made visible. Ash is memory. Soil is both origin and return.

To use what nature offers, or what remains after something has "served its purpose" — is a gesture of resilience and gratitude. It is a way of saying: what I have is enough. This moment is already full.

Rituals of Making: Ancient Gestures in a Contemporary World

In the gestures that precede the work, there is something ancestral. Grinding a pigment, dissolving salt in water, waiting for the sun to respond... These repeated movements become a form of quiet prayer, a choreography of care that speaks first to the body, then to the page.

When I teach or share my process, I speak less about “technique” and more about intention. It is the intention that transforms a simple action, like adding gum arabic to a pigment, into a ritual.

Art as Encounter, Not Outcome

My practice doesn’t seek a final object, but rather an encounter, with the material, with the land, with the emotions that rise between a drop of water and a pinch of earth.

This is where art and spirituality meet: in the ordinary, the simple, the vulnerable.

We don’t need sophisticated tools to create spaces of healing and presence. Sometimes, all it takes is a handful of soil, a bowl, and a moment in which we choose to listen instead of direct.