By the time you’ve read this sentence three people have been born into the world.
By the time you’ve read this sentence two will have passed away.
By the time you’ve lived through this twelve-hour day there will be 100,000 more children on the planet. And in the same twelve hours 70,000 people will have died.

Birthday is a work which sets out to record every individual birth and death over a twelve-hour period. Initially imagined to be realised in real time, marking the beat of each life with a small circle. But I immediately realised it was impossible to keep up with events and it would take many months to graphically capture the rhythm of life and death.

I find it interesting that we use numbers to quantify things yet once we pass a certain amount, scale slips away and it becomes incomprehensible. I wanted to understand what a 100,000 physically was – and for me that entailed marking out that number in pen and pencil.

In my mind I am still unable to comprehend such a figure but at least I know my body now holds a memory of the event.