During the lockdown of the global pandemic, a sketchbook journal became a steadying anchor—a way to mark the passage of time through those unsettled months. This square work unfolds nearly five years after a daily ritual that inspired it: each day I sketched and photographed the same plant. The piece draws on my earlier pandemic journal work Plant Series 2: Masked Cavendish 1 and an echo of this can be seen in the background.
The ghostly white foreground is made from the original sketch captured on 11 November 2020; its delicate shape is rendered in a soft, semi transparent layer and repeated in a smaller version below and to the right. Behind these layers floats the rising plant, photographed and blended in a spectral mode. All of this rests against a muted plum backdrop whose deep hue is both grounding and expansive, framing the interlocking angles of canvas, photograph, and ink.
The title “Sometimes Barely There” reflects the turbulence that isolation and illness produced in me, now softened into a meditative play of light and shadow. It invites the viewer to trace the subtle connections between memory, observation, and the calm that can emerge from uncertainty with the help of art.