Status check: 20/40 artworks

I thought it would be fun to share an update on my creative project for this year. I’m working on a series of 40 artworks, roughly one a week during school terms.

There is some logic to this madness:

• I love having a regular daily or weekly creative project. It gives some structure and routine to my creative practice and helps me to develop, creatively.

• Many of my childhood artworks are very large and elaborate, which translates to ‘very expensive’. I wanted to push myself to create a range of artworks that take less time, without sacrificing the elements that I feel are most important in my work (i.e. intricate piecework).

• This project is not about producing 40 sellable artworks, but rather about trying and experimenting, and quickly seeing what works or doesn’t work. Making incremental changes to my work and seeing what I do or don’t like obviously provides more immediate feedback on a weekly time scale, as opposed to producing an artwork every few months.

• When l’m investing a week, rather than several months, into an artwork, I feel more free to fail, and therefore more free to try things that are outside my comfort zone.

I recently completed the 20th piece in the series. I’ve since taken a few weeks break - partly to catch my breath, but more importantly, to take stock of how the series has progressed, and to think about the direction I want it to take from here. To do that I snapped a photo of each artwork, and collated them. I thought you might be interested, too - hence this post! I have some favourites, and some that may eventually be discretely removed from the series 😀.

If you have questions about this project, let me know and I’ll try to address them in a future post!