“Daily Somethings” in SAQA’s Virtual Gallery (Diary of recovery 4)

As I was walking to the bakery the other day I saw this little piece on the sidewalk and instinctively stopped and stooped to pick it up. 

Yes, it is Covid19 times and you are not supposed to pick up stuff because it might be contaminated... but I didn't care. The action, and the instinctiveness of it, reminded me of last year’s project “Daily Somethings”, which had started as a Daily Art project, then I got behind, then I decided to cut it short by limiting it to 100 days, and finally I added some more things when I was picking up and collecting stuff in South Africa. However, I was extremely behind on the dailiness of it all, and then I started doubting the quality of what I was producing. At some point I was very close to putting it in the bin, but Kathy Loomis’ insistence that it was well worth finishing helped me push it through. I still wasn’t sure I liked it, but at least it was finished, and I was going to give it a chance for a public appearance. 

detail of "Daily Somethings"

So at first thought I would enter it for Birmingham, but then the Festival got canceled, then the virtual galleries were initiated, and then a SAQA call came up first. So I entered it there, thinking it could always still be entered for Birmingham after it got rejected from the SAQA virtual gallery.

Then I had almost forgotten it and the announce-by-date when Claire Passmore sent me a message last week congratulating me for being chosen. I once messaged Claire from a show where she had won a prize congratulating her before she had been notified by the organizers, who knows, we might be establishing a tradition here… I hadn’t seen the message by then but checked my mail and was quite pleased to find out that I was one of 28 chosen from over 150 entries. Not a real in the terms of physical exhibition, but it was a good piece of news to receive in the context of a week that was full of mood swings.

In my mess on my desk I have since found two more items that could easily qualify for inclusion in Daily Somethings, one of them being this label that was attached to a jacket I bought in the fall for its bright yellow color only. 

Even then I wondered about this label – there had been another paper one on the jacket declaring it ‘vegan’, and that almost put me off buying the jacket entirely because I don’t really believe in veganism, and certainly not in clothes. And I am old enough to remember when clothes like this would have been disapproved of as being ‘100% polyester’ in certain parts of the population, back in those days when ‘natural’ was the total hype. Times change, don't they? But I wanted this yellow, so I denied all my principles and went ahead and bought it. (Despite my ‘not buying any new clothes’ mantra.)

But I am not doing anything daily right now, and because I still remember vividly how hard it turned out to finish this one that I have only opened a little box where stuff like the metal piece and the plastic label will be living for a while. Something might come of them, but right now I am only keeping them.

Thank you, Kathy, for making me persist by believing in this piece.