2020 Round Up
Well. 2020 sure did happen. Overall, a truly strange year creativity wise as well. I started with a lot of creative momentum, which quickly sputtered and spurted then petered out, and have been trying to stoke the coals. In order to remind myself that yes, things did happen, here are some highlights from the year.
Photographic Center NW had a staff & volunteer show at Atelier Dome for Pioneer Square Art Walk that I got to put a few photos in. It was a lot of firsts - baby’s first art walk show, plus I don’t think I’ve ever editioned my photo prints before, so it was a new experience to batch print, quality control, and sign. Learning!
I also kicked off the year by taking another Letterpress class at SVC! I really enjoyed pushing myself in Letterpress 1 where I made this RIDICULOUS (in terms of set-up/structure) pizza print. I was in the middle of working on a print when class was cut short by covid. Hopefully one day I’ll get to finish it!
My pottery journey was also cut short by covid. I was just starting on learning how to make jars, and my last day in the studio I threw my very first closed form jar. I tried hand building at home and sending off pieces to be fired, but after the June uprisings I lost a lot of my creative energy and mismanagement of the studio I was attending led me to the tough decision to leave it and find somewhere else upon reopening.
At the start of the pandemic when I was more restless I spent a lot of time trying to make sense of the extreme monotony through ritual and lots and lots of zines reflecting on these rituals.
Meanwhile at work, I executive produced season 2 (!!) of Rainy Day History, the podcast created by our youth advisors. It ended up being a perfect pandemic project and folks were so gracious with their time doing interviews with the students. It was such a joy to work on it with them, even if the project sometimes felt like too big of an undertaking. The stories they picked were intriguing, the guests delightful, and the end product an excellent work of public history.
Perhaps the only creative project I indulged in this summer was Fluffle: A Tiny Bunny Print Exchange. It was such a delight to receive my tiny bunny prints from artists all over the country. You can view all of the prints (they are still in the process of being shared) on their instagram account @tinybunnyprintexchange
I truly am a person who works best driven by deadlines (and apparently, print exchanges). This fall I committed myself to creativity with two months of the Zine of the Month Club run by Paper Press Punch. The first month the smoke rolled in for two weeks immediately after signing up. I hadn’t realized just how much the mini excursions out of my house (walks, stoop time, grocery runs) were making the pandemic easier until I literally couldn’t leave my house because of the smoke, which was even seeping in through the window seams. Working on a project was the only thing I really had to keep me grounded.
Now that I’ve been able to do a couple of things post-creative block I’m hoping I’ll can tackle a couple of larger projects this year. First baby steps are to do ZOMC again this month and give my “home studio” (my desk and bags of supplies) a little organizational love. Oh! I also started school! This fall I started in the UW Native Education Certificate Program. Getting the hang of being in school and working at the same time has been a bit of a learning curve, but so far it’s been great and I’m looking forward to what’s ahead.
Cheers!