In 2013 I made a face picture for every day of the year, starting on January the first. They were all on paper, 15 inch square. I tried not to think too hard about why I decided to do this and what I was hoping to end up with and, instead, to just enjoy the process as I had enjoyed drawing as a child. I used whatever I felt like, sometimes charcoal for a few days, pencil colours when I was away from my studio, paint if I felt like it. About half way through the year I realised that they were all girls, as most of my childhood drawings had been. Some of them are of my own daughters when they were younger, as well as my mother, my aunt, grandmother and my childhood friends. Some of them sprang straight from my imagination and some only became apparent as I started drawing.They feel like a family of people that I might have aspired to be or felt like at some point in my life. And very much as if they are in the past. I think I was waving goodbye to my fantasies of myself both as a girl and as the mother of little girls – an acknowledgment that our youngest daughter is grown up.
When I finished I displayed them in order on a wall and I also photographed them and created archival prints from singe faces and from grids of the faces, including the five grids shown below. For the five grids, I wanted to try to arrange the 365 pictures in identical rectangles but they wouldn’t fit exactly so I decided to use some pink squares to fill up the extra spaces: four in the first, three in the second, two in the third, one in the fourth and none in the fifth.
Also made tiny books of the 365 faces using archival inks on cotton rag paper.
