This project is interested in the instability of images and how they are affected by the passage of time. It draws on a diverse body of material, including the theory of deep time, the study of Bronze Age rock carvings and the digitisation of a library book, and examines how these images are situated in and changed by the course of time, and shaped by social and cultural contexts. In a moment when we regularly consider the speed and manipulation of images in society, this project – in its research and practice – asks how questions of temporality and shifting states can be explored through the image. The project’s title quotes the work of the philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who wrote that his memory of his first day at school was ‘doubtless an incomplete and wavering image and certainly a reconstructed one’. This project considers Halbwachs’ work, as well as that of other thinkers including Georges Didi-Huberman, Donna Haraway, Aleida Assmann and W.J.T. Mitchell, to interrogate the temporal possibilities of the image and it draws on Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay, ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ (1989) to inform the methodology of the research. The examples that structure this project—spanning scientific history, academia, and technology—could be described as part of what Pierre Nora calls our ‘institutions of memory’: bodies that shape the images we hold of the past, and of ourselves, as well as how and what we see. Concerned with questions of time and points of view in the space of the image, the project proceeds to seek alternative perspectives and turns to artworks and writing, often by women, including Mariana Castillo Deball, Camille Henrot, Elizabeth Price and Rebecca Solnit, to explore spaces, ideas and images shaped through different lenses. Matters of voice, nonlinearity, and erasure come to the fore over the course of this project and wavering is interrogated as an image in flux: vulnerable, malleable, impressionable, yet also resilient. The practice explores new visualities made possible by this approach. This line of enquiry has led to a focus on poured painting processes, and ideas of movement, restlessness, precarity and overspilling to be explored through the materiality of the image. Here, the research engages further with the work of contemporary women artists and writers including Lynda Benglis and Genieve Figgis, who develop related themes through their practice and question forms of representation and the materiality of the artwork. Drawing on broader discussions, it also explores ideas of ‘slippery’ and ‘sticky images’, drawn from the work of Mieke Bal, as well as the Hayward Gallery exhibition, ‘Mixing It Up: Painting Today’ (2021). Through this, the research seeks to contribute to discourses around viscosity and materiality in contemporary art, it asks who we can hold space for in the space of the image and what new visual languages the wavering image can offer for this investigation.