The 100 Days Project was a community arts project that was established by Emma Rogan and ran between 2011 and 2018. Held once a year, anyone, of any age and skill level could sign up to participate in this creative marathon. Participants or 'hundred dayers' as they came to be known, agreed to perform one simple creative exercise (of their own choosing) every day without a break for 100 consecutive days.
The only rules: that you could not skip a day and had to record each day's effort.
exhibit
2013 • 100 Days Project •
By 2018 more than 5,000 people from all over the world had taken part in the project, which culminated each year in pop-up exhibitions called 'Day 100 Shows' to showcase the resulting work. We celebrated Day 100 many times over across New Zealand and the world, including shows in Auckland, Nelson, Gisborne, Wellington, Christchurch, Melbourne, Sydney, The Netherlands and Edinburgh. Although currently on hiatus, there is a strong community of hundred dayers who now manage and organise their own projects onFacebook.
My 100 Days Project
I chose to paint a self-portrait because off the tradition of oil painters to use themselves as model. If I had realised the clinical detail these small abstract panels would create, the microscopic scrutiny, I would have chosen anyone else! It makes me uncomfortable to see this work, this rendition of me, observing myself. My plan was to take a photograph, divide it up unto square segments, which because of their small size become abstracts, and then complete a daily painting mimicking the small segment. The finished work is very large (180 by 180 cm) yet due to the fact that the substrate is 100 18 x 18 cm panels - it all fits in a very small box on a shelf in my studio. To construct the finished artwork and make sense of the Rorschach inkblot looking patterns, there is a legend attached with the box with an image of each piece in its correct position.
Day 1
I began with a photograph which was divided into 10 by 10 squares (making 100 in total - one for each day). Each day I completed a new small abstract painting onto single panel - with no reference to the segment completed the day before or to the rest of the image as a whole.
All the days inbetween...
The paints used were a mix of water based acrylics with oils, creating a difficult, more spontaneous result which couldn't be easily manipulated into a form. After the first month, I began to look forward to my studio time and used the initial panel painting as a warmup to the day in the studio. Weekends were difficult at times, with other commitments, family, kids and travel all having to be incorporated into the routine.
By Day 100 I had accomplished the initial desire to create a daily habit of painting and the many pieces were collected for hanging. I had to develop a system to catalogue each individual piece to know it's precise location within the jigsaw of the whole. As well as being show at the 100 Day Project exhibition, my painting was exhibited in The Figure in Art - Uxbridge Creative Centre (group exhibition)