12.1.13

12.1.13

I’m back!!

So a couple years ago I started this blog with the idea that I would take a picture every day and blog about it.  I also started graduate school at the School of the Art Institute and didn’t realize that I would be biting off more than I could chew by trying to blog every day.  Blog + Thesis Research + Full Time Job = Absolutely no time to enjoy the important parts of life.  I had to cut something, so the blog was put on hold.

Rather than jumping in head first after graduation, I took some time to think about what my goals were for this blog.  During graduate school one of my favorite musicians, Sleeping At Last, did a year long project called “Yearbook”.  Each month a couple songs were released creating a fantastic album by the end of the fiscal year that it started. Seriously, its fantastic go check it out on iTunes.  Also, while I was in grad school, I went to an artist talk by Tehching Hsieh.  I could never do the year long, rule driven, never-go-outside or clock-in-every-hour, projects Hsieh did.  However both Sleeping at Last and Hsieh, continued to renew my interest in completing my own year-long creative journey.

Before starting a long-term project I had to decide what I could handle.  I knew that a daily post was going to be to much and I didn’t want to limit myself to just photography.  Being an art teacher by day, I love the idea of exploring new materials, embracing familiar media, and the element of play that young children naturally add to their artwork.

The next influence for the project came during my Ceramic Moldmaking class at SAIC.  We did an exercise where we picked three words out of a bag and those words were our mold for the project.  For example, I had press, so I pressed a clay tool into a bunch of balls of clay.  I loved the idea of taking a word and running with it, and soon realized this could be the basis of each of the art works I would create throughout the year.  To gather the words, I wanted to explore how connected we are through social media.  After only two call-outs on Facebook and Twitter I had well over fifty-two words, one for each week of the year.

All that considered, my final goal for this year-long series is to create fifty-two pieces based off of the words gathered through my relationships on social media and to blog about the process.  My goal is to post one piece each week starting either the week of December 1st or December 8th.  Some of the interpretation creations might be very literal, others more abstract.  That’s what I’m most excited about...the unknown creations that are waiting ahead.

Let the journey begin!!