Tuesday, January 1, 2019

New Work: Dates in a Life Project 2018


Happy New Year!

The Dates in a Life Project 2018 was a year-long painting project documenting the number of steps I walked each day. 

I prefer to walk for exercise, as time permits, outside in addition to whatever other walking I do as I go about my day. My goal was to walk as much as I could every day. 

To keep track of steps, I used the Health app in my iPhone. 

I worked out a system of symbols to represent each thousand steps. Instead of showing exactly how many I walked each day, I rounded up or down. As an example, 1500-2499 steps equals 2000, and 2500-3499 steps equals 3000 steps. 

The black icons represent up to 9999 steps walked, red represents 10,000-19,999 steps and yellow represents 20,000-29,999 steps.

The colored squares have different meanings about reasons I may have walked more or less on those specific days. White means snow or ice, extreme cold is blue, extremely hot is red, very rainy all day is teal blue, being sick is Indian Yellow Hue, recovering from surgery is yellow, being on vacation or away from home is green, and working on election day is purple.

The solid white squares highlight Saturdays and Sundays in columns. I usually (but not always) had more time to walk on the weekend, after I caught up on sleep and had more energy to exercise.

This piece measures 33" x 39" and was created with monoprinted textures of a construction fence as the background, handstamped rubber erasers on fabric which are collaged on the background grid, as well as handpainting and stitching on stiffened fabric.

I really enjoyed working on this in 2018 and will do it again this year. Look for updates about Dates in a Life Project 2019, as I document my steps in a horizontal format with a different way to log them each day.