I never thought of my arts practice as a writing practice. However as I write about my practice every week, I realise that my blogposts are also a creative output. I’ve probably got more writings than visual artworks considering I have been posting in my blog since May 2018.
That first year my posts were sporadic. When we travelled overseas for three months in April 2018, I wrote regularly about our trip, including a blogpost every day in July when I was at my first international artist residency in Lasalle, France. The following year I began in earnest writing a post every week. That now makes over 300 posts, which is a lot of writing!
When I was at the ABBE artist book conference in Mackay, many of the presenters talked about the importance of archiving your work. If/when the internet fails and all your files are in the ‘cloud’ you will never be able to retrieve them again. Or if my website gets corrupted, or I fail to make the annual subscription payment…the list of maybes continues.
So I have decided I am going to make a start on creating a yearly blogpost series called A Year of Sundays. This will include all the blogposts from 2019 to 2024. I’ve made books about my work before and I know it takes a long time to format all the pictures and text into a compatible book layout format.
It was a daunting prospect to think about the work that lay ahead. The best time to start such a project was 6 years ago, the next best time to start was this week which is exactly what I did, starting with the year closest to 2025 and working backwards from there.
Once I had a layout with one picture and the text below, the next step was to edit the posts as I dropped the text into its text container. Some blogposts were shorter than others, some were way too long. I had to make the text a little smaller to fit the majority of the blogposts, but keep it still easy enough to read.
I was surprised at some of my outpourings and thoughts from a year ago. So much has happened since then but it is good to know I can look back on what I wrote and have my memory jogged. I do a little bit on the book every afternoon and am now nearly finished the 2024 book, although I have yet to create the covers.
It’s a good little project I can do when resting on the bed after a morning in the studio or the garden. I will get the 2024 book completed before I start on the next ones. Then I’ll be eagerly awaiting the mail to finally hold the book in my hands.
I work with double page spreads. This is page 12 and 13 of A Year of Sundays, 2024.