Folio highlights creators working with unexpected media and materials. This edition is by Clara Congdon.
My Calendar Series Project is a living archive that chronicles my experience through small, daily artworks that ultimately get assembled into miniature quilts. I assign myself a different prompt every month, then proceed to document each day accord- ingly on a two-inch square of cloth or paper. At the end of the month, I sew the squares together into the shape of a calendar. For example, the prompt for April 2017 was to stitch the headline that had appeared most frequently on my phone’s news app that day. The following October, it was to stitch the name of a creative professional whose work I had consumed. As time passes, these calendars remain as evidence of my evolving thoughts, experiments, projects, relationships, concerns, and observations.
Clara Congdon is an emerging artist based in Montreal. She makes tactile drawings and artist’s books exploring gender, media consumption and representation, and personal archives. Her latest artist’s book, Want to buy some illusions?, is currently featured in Art of the Book 2018, a travelling exhibition of work by members of the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild. Most recently, she launched You Betcha Iris, a zine profiling members of Montreal’s drag community.