PROJECT 5 / 2022
Time Is…
Five hand-printed cards made from community responses about time — urgency, memory, gifts, narratives, and the moments we keep with others.
YEAR
2022
ISSUE
How do we relate to time?
PARTNER
Tak Takut Kids Club by 3Pumpkins
The Issue
We talk about time constantly — saving it, wasting it, running out of it — but rarely stop to ask what we mean. I started with questions, and what came back was a mix of answers that did not fit neatly together. That felt worth exploring.
Five Ways Time Came Back
The five themes emerged from community responses I collected about time. I have kept the fuller response archive in an Instagram highlight, so this section can focus on what each theme opened up.
View response highlight
1. Time is urgency
Time is what you pay attention to when you need to catch a bus, train, or plane. I found years of saved transit screenshots: Italian train timetables, Swiss transit apps, departure boards from trips I had long forgotten. The vigilance around transport time is real. It pulls you out of the place you are actually in and puts you somewhere you are not yet.
2. Time is noticed before or after it passes
Two memories anchored this part of the project: a recipe book inscribed by a teacher who passed away that year, and a Registry of Marriages appointment slot that once caused a small panic. Looking back, both moments mean something completely different from what they felt like in the middle. Savouring, I think, mostly happens after. Or in anticipation. Rarely in the middle.
3. Time is a gift
The most romantic thing about time is that everyone has a finite amount of it. That is what makes it worth giving. One person framed it as a love language: giving someone your time is a way of showing love. I carved two rubber stamps for this — a gift box paired with an hourglass, and a row of graters for grate-fulness.
4. Time is a narrative we can rewrite
This theme came from a response I had not expected: if time is a collection of experiences that shape us, then we can rewrite how we understand the past, and that changes what we do next. When one is young, things can get blown a bit out of proportion. After enough time, what stayed was not the punishment, but what I learned about being able to change my own story.
5. Time is measured in experiences and memories
I visited Tak Takut Kids Club during this project, and one afternoon we peeled old murals off the wall. The layers had been building up for years, painted over for different occasions, each one marking something. Peeling them back was not erasing the memories. It was making room for new ones.
The Exchange
At the end of the project, I put together a set of five hand-printed cards, one for each theme, to reflect on time, and to share with people who have gone through time with you.
Each set was sold at SGD $15, with 100% of proceeds donated to Tak Takut Kids Club’s “This Is Us!” 2022 fundraising campaign.
Card 1 — Linocut card: a handprinted journey-and-time image for writing to someone you shared a journey with.
Card 2 — Timestamp card: handprinted with any date and time of your choice, for marking a moment that mattered.
Cards 3 & 4 — Rubber stamp cards: the gift of time and grate-fulness, for writing to give time or show gratitude for someone else’s.
Card 5 — Future-self card: a postcard sent forward as a prompt to check in on the narrative you had written for yourself.
The Cause
Tak Takut Kids Club is a community space in Boon Lay Drive, run by non-profit 3Pumpkins. It is open to children and young persons aged 7 to 14 with diverse needs and backgrounds. It has a multi-purpose art studio, a community kitchen, and a children’s garden — a place that keeps time in layers, murals, meals, conversations, and cycles of celebration.