Routines As Records: Storytelling Through the Everyday

This thesis explores the quiet routines and chores that shape our days such as cooking, cleaning, doing our laundry, self care routine, going on our daily commute to school or work, not as background noise, but as stories waiting to be told. Exploring time spent in these liminal spaces between turning points in our lives. What happens when we pause and pay attention to the overlooked? This project began with a question: why do these ordinary moments feel so intimate, yet remain so easy to dismiss? What are we missing when we don’t take notice of our routines, when we don’t pay attention to them? In a world that celebrates spectacle, this thesis turns toward the slow, the ordinary, the deeply human. It offers storytelling as a way to shift from detachment to presence, from overlooking the everyday to embracing it as a source of connection, expression, and quiet beauty.

‘That Time When: A Collection of Little Stories’

This project is a box of 46 postcards, fragments from my everyday that I captured in the form of hand drawn illustration while also recording my thoughts that I had while I was doing these chores as a way to honor the quiet weight of routine. Drawn from daily life, each postcard captures a moment that might otherwise go unnoticed: a dish in the sink, a conversation while cooking, the way a shadow falls on a counter.

The work invites viewers to slow down, to sit with these stories and the objects, gestures, and chores that shape our days. Positioned within a frame-like box, the collection becomes both archive and altar, a space to recognize domestic labor, invisible care, and the stories we often don’t think to tell.

Rooted in feminist theory and Silvia Federici ‘Wages Against Housework’ and personal reflection, the work explores how domestic labor, often feminized and rendered invisible, can be reclaimed through acts of documentation. Inspired by diaristic methods and artists like Sophie Calle, the project challenges what counts as worthy of attention.