Tag Archives: Diary Project

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I've been in a creative slump lately because I've been unwell. I just haven't had the energy to do much of anything, let alone making art - although of course, I'm still doing my daily envelopes for The Diary Project. But overall, I've just been feeling totally blah about my work - it happens and I know it'll pass but it's still not a fun place to be in.

One of the few things that has been creatively exciting me lately is Camilla Engman's Organized Collection group on Flickr.

So my art practice for the last few weeks has mostly involved collecting little object on the days when I've been able to get out and about and just taking simple photos of them on walls or paving stones. It's small and it's simple but at least it makes me feel as if I'm still doing something.

Kirsty Hall, photograph of red rubber bands
Kirsty Hall, found rubber bands, October 2007

Kirsty Hall, photograph of red rubber bands
Kirsty Hall, found rubber bands, October 2007

One of the things I noticed when I first started joining Flickr groups was how it made me see the world in different ways and how I stretched my photography a little bit because of it. I'd take different photos than usual because I'd think "hey, that would be a good shot for such-and-such a group". If you're feeling the need for a bit of a creative stretch, particularly in relation to your photography, then I'd recommend it.

And having said all that, I'm now going to take myself and my camera outside to the garden to see what I can find, before I need to go for yet another rest.

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The Diary Project suffered its first real casualty recently when this envelope came back so mauled that the Royal Mail put it in a special 'oh dear, we're incredibly sorry' plastic bag. Amazingly, the contents are still inside.

Kirsty Hall - Diary Project envelope from Sept 10th, drawing on damaged envelope
Kirsty Hall: Diary Project envelope from the 10th September 2007

bag
Kirsty Hall: plastic bag from the Royal Mail

I was totally thrilled, it's the most exciting thing that's happened so far!

The project blog is currently up to date until the 16th September and should be updated again over the weekend, although we have house guests this weekend so it might not happen until Monday. I've been a bit behind with it lately but I'm attempting to get back onto a regular schedule with updates. If I leave it too long it gets completely overwhelming.

I got an interesting email from someone a couple of weeks ago asking me why I post the letters to myself and not to another person. I won't post their original letter because they haven't responded to my request to do so but here's an extract from my reply:

Why do I post the letters? Well, I like the sense of risk involved - the envelopes might get lost in the post or damaged. I'm a bit of a control freak so posting the letters is an interesting way for me to let go a bit. My work has always involved a certain amount of 'letting nature take its course' - in the past I've often made sculptures that rot, decay or slowly change. I like to open myself up to chaos a little because it challenges me and the posting does that. Plus, I've always been interested in the idea of journeys and I love the fact that the envelopes take these little journeys without me.

I wanted to send the envelopes to myself rather than someone else because I wanted to have them all to exhibit at the end of the year. Also, there's just something very absurd about sending letters to yourself for a year and that aspect of the project makes me laugh. And on a completely mundane level, I absolutely love getting post and because of this project, I get a year's worth of letters, which just delights me. I get a little bit excited every time a letter comes home safely.

Oh, and I think that posting the letters also stops me cheating. It's a firm deadline - I absolutely have to get the letter in the postbox by midnight or I've failed for that day. It's good to have that sense of 'I must get this done'. I know that no one but me would know if I did the letter after midnight but somehow having to go out and post them keeps me honest about the project. I don't know why, but somehow it works as an external control.

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Kirsty Hall - art, mail art, Diary Project 242

I did a massive update over on The Diary Project at the weekend. It's been getting harder and harder to find something to say about every individual drawing, so it sometimes it takes me a while to get the scans up there. I've got another six that I uploaded onto Flickr over the weekend that I need to write bits of blurb for.

It's definitely getting harder to come up with new drawings too, I keep worrying that I'm repeating myself too much but fortunately I hit on a couple of new drawing techniques last night, so that should keep me inspired this week.

I'm going to try to get round to that second Diary Project update later today but right now, I'm heading over to Spike Island to sit in the Associate Space and do some research. I've been meaning to get over there and do some reading for ages, they've got a small but interesting-looking selection of art books. The thing I miss most about college is the lack of access to decent art books and magazines. I don't have much of a budget for them (they're so expensive) so I miss the college library like crazy. The local council library doesn't have a particularly great art selection and although I can and do order stuff in, I miss the serendipity of random browsing. The little local college where I do my silversmithing course has an art library but it's so small and after several years of studying there, I've read most of the interesting stuff. I'm looking forward to starting back there on Wednesday though because there's bound to be a few new books and magazines that came in over the summer.

My book consumption slumped drastically over the summer. For some reason I just wasn't feeling like reading (it happens occasionally, even to this confirmed bookworm!), so I could use a bit of a boost in that area.

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Katherine, over at Making A Mark (an art blog you should all be reading - she has masses of great information), has a very informative article about using labels in Blogger. Despite hosting The Diary Project for 8 months over on Blogger, I'd honestly never noticed the little labels box before Katherine pointed it out. I'm a bit rubbish at using tags - I always forget them over in Livejournal and I only use them in Flickr because they make them so very obvious - but I can certainly see how useful they are: not only can they improve your visibility but they can also make it a lot easier for you to search for older posts that you might want to link back to.

So I've just mass edited the Diary Project posts to include the labels 'Diary Project', envelope, drawing and art. Not very helpful in terms of separating them out but it might improve the project's visibility in Google and on Technorati. I'll go and look at the posts individually when I have the time to see if there are more individual categories that I could add. If you subscribe to the Diary Project and it republishes all the posts because of this, then I apologise.

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the heartful blogger has started a project called 100 Letters, that is directly inspired by The Diary Project. I'm so flattered!

She will be sending out 100 proper handwritten letters in a year and she'll be doing a drawing on the back of each. As you can see, her drawing style is quite different from my own.

The Heartful Blogger - Envelope No 1
The Heartful Blogger: Envelope No 1

I wish her every success and hope she enjoys her project as much as I (mostly!) enjoy mine. And now, I really must give myself a small mental kick and go and draw my own envelope...

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And I've done it! Yep, there's a new post over on the a-n Diary Project blog so I am now officially up to date with the Diary Project.

Sure, there's probably a dozen other things that I could do for the project, especially in terms of promotion, but now that I've done that blog post there's nothing that's urgent or lingering.

My tip of the day: make a start on something that you've been procrastinating about. It probably won't take nearly as long as you think and you'll feel fantastic when you finally get it off your to-do list and your conscience.

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I've updated The Diary Project this morning and it's all completely up to date, which always makes me happy.

DP 220
Kirsty Hall: Diary Project envelope from 8th August 2007

I am a little cross this morning though because I can't find my username and password for my a-n projects unedited blog. I've been meaning to update it for absolutely ages - it's getting to the embarrassing point at this stage - but it kept falling off the bottom of the list. I'd finally got myself organised to sit down and do it this morning and then promptly found that I couldn't. Grrrr... I'm going off to try various options in the hope that I can drag something up from my memory, if not, I'll email them and try not to look like a complete idiot!*

On the plus side, I've just learnt how to make text change size in WordPress, the rather fabulous open source software that runs this site. This is happy-making because I try to learn something new every single day, even if it's just a little thing. I like getting to the end of the day and thinking 'well hey, whatever else happened, at least I learnt something today'. Hmm, I wonder if that's partly an artist thing? What do you think? Certainly, I think that creative people of any stripe tend to have more than average curiosity and that's often coupled with a desire to find out how things work and learn new things. I also think that creative people are frequently fuelled by dissatisfaction - you know the feeling, 'well, it's kind of OK but it could be even BETTER!' Of such constant thoughts are new things born. It always amazes me that people who aren't artists have this romantic notion about how it must be wonderful all the time, when in reality it's usually more like an itch that you can't quite scratch!

*EDIT: Much to my great surprise, I did manage to guess the username/password combination so I now have absolutely no excuse if I don't update that poor neglected little blog today!

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A huge thanks to Alyson B. Stanfield over at the ArtBizBlog for linking to my previous post about the importance of artists getting online. As a result I had nearly 200 new visitors over the weekend - previous to this I was hugely excited if I got more than 20 visitors in a day, so to get 131 visitors on Saturday and a further 62 on Sunday was a bit mind-blowing.

I was away over the weekend celebrating my 13th anniversary with my honey - I literally finished the post on Saturday morning, emailed Alyson to let her know about it and then promptly left. I had no internet access over the weekend so it was very exciting to log on this evening to discover that lots of people had read the article and that it was being linked in various places. Lots of you also left interesting comments and I'll be answering them all when I've had a chance to unpack and recover from all the driving.

If you've made it here from Alyson's blog then I extend a warm welcome and I hope you'll be back in the future: I'm planning a lot more articles about how artists can best utilise the web. Since I'm an artist and a curator, the articles will be looking at things from both sides of the fence.

In the meantime, please feel free to investigate The Diary Project - I'm doing a drawing every day for the entirety of 2007 and blogging them. The drawings are done on the back of envelopes, then I put something secret inside and post the envelope back to myself. Since the rule is that the day's envelope has to be posted before midnight, I'd better stop blogging now and get on with today's drawing!

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Because you can never have too many skulls!

Skull-A-Day

Skull-A-Day is making and posting a skull every day for a year. There are some wonderfully images and creative uses of a wide range of materials.

I just love the idea of reinventing a very simple, iconic image every single day for a year - it kind of makes the Diary Project seem easy! I think I'd go bananas if I was restricted to one image for an entire year but maybe being restricted to an envelope and whatever you can fit inside it would feel too restrictive to other people. Everyone's art boundaries are different and I can definitely see the joy in being able to explore so many different materials whilst having the focus of repeating a single image.

I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this project - they only started in June so they've got quite a way to go but they've certainly got off to a roaring start. Oh, and if you want to participate they also post skull images sent in by readers.

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Kirsty Hall - The Diary Project, envelope drawing

DP 211, originally uploaded by kmhlamia.

I've just finished a mammoth Diary Project update and it's all up to date again. This is my favourite envelope out of the 9 I've just scanned.

For those of you who haven't checked out the rest of my site and seen the 'work in progress' section, The Diary Project is a year long art project where I'm drawing on the back of an envelope every single day for 2007. The envelope is then filled with something secret and posted back to myself before my daily midnight deadline. Hopefully next year, I'll get an exhibition where all the envelopes can be shown altogether and people will be able to open them and investigate the contents. It's like a very, very slow form of blogging! If you happen to know a gallery who might be interested in showing the work, please let me know: I need to start organising that part soon and any useful suggestions or contacts would be very welcome.