No. 58 - The Journal Project
And where all those torn pieces ended up
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Life is being a bit too life-like at the moment and I’m not getting into the studio at all. As in, AT ALL. So there’s no progress on the graphic memoir that I was *supposed to* start last summer. God is still laughing at my plans… HA HA HA.
Instead, this post is one I’ve been thinking about for a while… about the trajectory of my first 62 or so journals from solid objects to torn up pieces of paper to fluttering, ethereal particles hanging in a former bank vault in a gallery in Victoria, BC.
Those who’ve followed my Life’s Work: A Visual Memoir project or saw the exhibit at the Victoria Arts Council in June will know the back-story, so I won’t linger on it super hard. It goes something like this:
My mother was moved into a care home in the fall of 2014, two years after being diagnosed with Lewy Body dementia. It fell upon me to clear out the house she’d lived in for 52 years—the house I grew up in. It took seven months.
That experience made me determined to not put my daughter through the same thing in the scary future. I went through every room in our house brutally culling all extraneous crap, and eventually we had a monstrous garage sale.
But what about my boxes of journals—some 70 of them at the time, dating back to 1978? Should I get rid of them? Could I part with them? I HAD TO!
Or so I felt. I didn't want my daughter to have to deal with them. So after my mother died in January of 2017 I embarked upon The Journal Project. I read each journal in order, took photos of the covers, took photos of pertinent pages, and saved select pages. The rest got torn into pieces.
Isn't that what everyone does when they're grieving?
Some friends were aghast that I wasn't saving this legacy of mine for my daughter—but believe me—she's not interested. And rightly so. My journals weren't for anyone's eyes but my own. Not because they were salacious or contained secrets—they were just pages and pages of me working things out. Discovering what I thought by letting it emerge on paper. Coming to terms. Self-regulating, self-medicating, problem-solving.
Some of my journals were unadulterated dreck. Some contained pithy gems—things I was surprised to see I'd grasped when so much younger. Some journals I felt deserved to be saved in their entirety, and they were. One day while working on the project I was struck by the thought, "Oh my God, is this my life's work?".
Hence the name of the project that followed.
And yes, it was a bit of a joke—one’s “life’s work” would normally be something a little more illustrious than producing volumes of work in the effort to be less dysfunctional.
Whadygonnadoo?
Here’s a sample of some adorned covers and random pages:
This still makes me laugh. I was going to Europe at the age of 21 and I needed passport photos. The one on the right was the first one I had taken and I was horrified—I thought I looked like a lunatic. I went to a different place and got the photo on the left taken, and although the photo was better, I was still horrified. Never before or since have I looked so much like the actress Karen Black:
These photos include some later journals that weren’t part of The Journal Project—the last five pictured still exist. Plus many others at this point.
Let’s tear ‘em up!
ABOUT JOURNALING…
I've always felt that my journals saved my ass, emotionally speaking, and resulted in seeing me through and making me who I am. On one level, it's clearly helpful to get things off your chest in a safe place, and acknowledging your feelings goes a long way toward accepting them and calming your mind. On a more mysterious level, journal writing is an alchemical process… transformative and healing.
When you put your experience into words you make the experience graspable, tameable. Putting pen to paper, you gain clarity on thoughts that might otherwise remain fleeting. You name them and you claim them. Studies have shown that writing down your thoughts and feelings in a journal:
relieves stress
promotes sleep
strengthens memory
calms the monkey mind
tames emotions
helps you gain perspective
promotes empathy for others
helps with depression and anxiety
promotes creativity
strengthens your sense of self
And so much more. Essentially, it promotes self-awareness and emotional intelligence. BAM. You learn to name your feelings and not be overwhelmed by them. You learn to identify your “triggers” and not be controlled by them. You can transform the chaos of a churning brain into a deeper understanding of yourself, your relationships, and your life.
I feel like I’m writing a public service announcement for journal writing. And I’m thinking I’ll have to write more in-depth about it in the future because, well, you’re supposed to “write what you know”. And I definitely know journaling, and know all of the above statements to be true. Stay tuned for further public service announcements.
So what became of the torn journal pieces, you ask? They lived in a vat in my studio for a few years—actually a laundry basket approximately twenty inches across, made taller with a sleeve of matt mylar to contain the tower of torn bits:
They’re still there, though the pile is slightly lower now. Only slightly.
In 2019 I had an idea: I glued some of the torn pieces on a large piece of paper fish-scale-style, then painted a self-portrait on top:
In 2020 I started work in earnest toward the exhibit Life’s Work: A Visual Memoir, about my mother’s Lewy Body dementia and my relationship with her, at the Victoria Arts Council. At some point I had the idea to suspend lines of the torn journal pieces as part of the show, though I wasn’t sure how it would work, or how they would be displayed. At first I tried gluing them together corner to corner, but the result was too stiff and immobile (kind of reminiscent of Brancusi’s Endless Column, come to think of it). You can see a few of those initial experiments in the following photo, over to the right:
I wanted the pieces to have movement so I decided to string them on to clear nylon fishing line to get the effect I was after. I wanted them to move, to be light and airy.
I cut lengths of fishing line approximately ninety inches long, knotted one end and threaded a large needle on the other. At periodic intervals in the line I made a knot, then pierced through torn pieces of journal with the needle and let the paper fall till it hit the knot.
Of course this was all very tricky because the lines were so long, so I had to work standing at the kitchen counter—it was quite physical and hurt my back. I got a kind of system down, then worked like hell at it for weeks.
These long wispy lines of journal bits had to be stored without getting tangled up, so I hung them from the picture rail, first in the living room and then the bedroom:
I absolutely loved the look of all this paper and would’ve kept it in the bedroom forever if it weren’t for envisioning the dusting it would involve—oy yoy. I can’t look at anything intricate or delicate without thinking about how I’d eventually have to clean it. But the paper… so beautiful.
By this point it had been decided that for the Life’s Work: A Visual Memoir show I could use the vault for my hanging bits—the Victoria Arts Council building was a bank back in the day—and that I’d string up “laundry lines” of hanging journal pieces from wall to wall in that tiny room. In order to make these “laundry lines” I strung a piece of thicker fishing line between two door-jambs in the hallway of our house—it so happened that they were the perfect distance apart—and then suspended fifteen strings of the lines you see above down from that.
But how to get these things from my house to the gallery? You must be dying to know how I did that! The slightest movement would make the lines flutter and get tangled up with each other, so I needed to MacGyver something for transport.
I actually enjoyed coming up with solutions to all these weird problems… problems that I imagine no-one else has ever had, nor will ever have.
While the “laundry lines” were still hanging in the hallway of the house, one by one I gathered the torn paper on each line and attached the pile to the top line with a paper clip. When all the paper was clipped to the main laundry line, I gingerly lowered said line into a long strip of thin plastic waiting on the ground. Then I wrapped the line in the plastic, and folded the plastic in three sections, thus rendering the lines inert and unable to mingle. PHEW! Done deal! Threw them in a box! Took them to the gallery!
I didn’t know what the installation would look like, but as it turned out I couldn’t have been happier. More than one person likened the room to a brain—interesting. The myriad other comments I heard I sadly can’t remember. If you were there and made one of these comments, please remind me!
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I think your journals are for sure your life’s work, or one of the major ones up until now. Seeing your pages, reading your reflections on them, following you through your brilliant plan for tearing, stringing, transporting, and hanging in the bank vault for your show…so inspiring and connecting. Your torn pages are like feathers fluttering from a thousand flights you’ve taken, and seeing them takes me on my own flight into thought, memory, creativity. I hope you continue journaling and sharing your pages and thoughts!! Love your work. xxDawn
I’ve tried to convince my offspring of the satisfaction of journaling. I use my old journals to help me remember to my maiden self, as though I’ve been diluted by mothering and time. My Jungian perspective places high importance on the games we play as children. Writing it all down then has been a gift to the future me. Maybe if I tell them Betty Ann journals it will start to sink in.