That Was The Week That Was — 31st May 2026

One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

I've always been struck by the incredible way Woolf talks about the seemingly ordinary everyday, almost at a subatomic Quantum level. Reading To the Lighthouse only cemented that opinion, originally formed when I first read The Waves, which still remains my favourite of all her works.

Waves are a constant recurring theme within her work and much has been written about Woolf and it's correlation with the Quantum world, such as this paper Schrödinger’s Woolf written by Catriona Livingstone and published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.

This week I found myself playing with waves in various forms, together with exploring using IBM's Quantum computing offering in some new experimental sketches centered around my archive in superposition and making use of Quantum randomness.

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant show of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, they accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning to the end.
— Virginia Woolf