July 13, 2024

#3: the projects that don't come together

also: "scribbles and pages" is now > "process notes"

Hi there! Happy July. Thanks for being here!

A note of housekeeping: “Scribbles & Pages,” the original name of this newsletter, is now “Process Notes.” Scribbles & Pages sounded like a brand purpose-built for the Internet; it didn’t feel authentic. I was also titling every post “Process Notes” anyways, so made sense to make it the title of the whole newsletter.

Since my last letter:

• I experimented with a visual/curation project and it didn’t work

• I read a beautiful zine

• I thought about the relationship between my creative work and the Internet/social media

🎨 Making

Over the Fourth of July weekend, I worked feverishly to bring a zine project to life. My idea was a visual exploration of kitchens, which I would call Kitchen Zine. I would curate a selection of digitized archival photographs of kitchens exploring the idea of kitchens from different angles — e.g., the kitchen as domestic space, the kitchen as a site of “modernity,” the kitchen as isolation, the kitchen as community. But at the end of the weekend, I reviewed what I’d made so far and realized it wasn’t working. The realization was the writing equivalent of realizing you took your cake out of the oven too soon, and the center is goopy and sunken: you’re mad you’ve wasted the time and ingredients to make it, and also, you don’t have any cake.

The problems started with the images themselves. Digital archives are free to browse but have restrictions on distribution, especially for the more modern images (1950s onward) I was hoping to use. It was difficult to recreate my same vision with public domain images, which varied wildly in composition, color and style. As I’d struggled to find public domain images that “matched” the ones I’d hoped to use, I lost the thread of why I’d started in the first place.

When projects don’t work out how I hoped, I’m learning to be curious about why, instead of ashamed for failing. Why had I wanted to make a project about kitchens in the first place? The images I collected didn’t work together in the way I hoped, but was there a conceptual thread I could keep pulling on? When I reflected on those questions, I realized I had the seed of an essay, which I likely wouldn’t have created without my first, underbaked cake.

📚 Reading

Amy Bornman’s zine “Objects,” published under her publishing imprint, Imaginary Lake, is a beautiful essay about our life with objects, and how objects seep into our understanding of each other and ourselves. At a moment when the trend is to embrace minimalism and reject “clutter,” Bornman makes a powerful case for the worthiness of objects: in and through our objects, she writes, we find deeper connection to the world and the processes in the world that create said objects.This idea resonated powerfully with me. After I read her zine, I thought about how I live alone, yet my house feels full and alive—because I have filled it with objects I love. These objects remind me that I belong to a social and world that extends beyond my walls.

💭 Thinking

I haven’t used traditional, posting/profile-based social media since 2017, when I left both Facebook and Instagram in one fell swoop. However, I want to build a body of creative work, and I both want to find my readers and for my readers to find me. This means at some level my art needs to exist on the Internet. This week I explored the ideas of artist Kening Zhu (here is an interview she gave with SPACIES), specifically her concepts of digital world-building and introvert marketing, to help me think about how to do that sustainably. She encourages artists to “make art in the void,” essentially, to make your art and put it out there in a space that is completely your own, independent of social media and its imperative to amass views. Her ideas have inspired me to keep building my vision of what my space will be—separate from even this newsletter (which is on a platform, Substack, with an increasing amount of social media features, e.g., “likes” and “comments” and “follows.”) More soon!

Thank you again for reading and being here,

Catherine