When we want to wake/shake up our thinking, we check in at Dominic Wilcox‘s blog Variations on Normal. You never know what that clever guy will come up with. We especially love his month-long project, Speed Creating. Every day for 30 consecutive days, HE practiced waking up his thinking by making something creative with whatever was at hand in the course of his day, whether at home, in his studio, on the subway – anywhere. Writes Wilcox:
I believe that this self-imposed project with it’s constraints on time and money will force me to take an instinctive and experimental approach. The fear of failure and the usual time spent thinking through the potential pitfalls of a project will not be an option and I will need to react swiftly to my thoughts, observations and experimental outcomes discovered along the way. I am not focused solely on the final objects or images but on the creative journey I take. Complete failures are expected and embraced.
We love that Wilcox created a practice with inbuilt constraints designed to push his own limits and experiment, embracing the possibility of failure. You can see the 30 projects he came up with here. We especially love his Measuring Tape Diary made by spray painting an extended measuring tape white, and then recording the events of his day on it. We can imagine someone – or Wilcox himself – coming across it years later, and opening it up to discover…a day.
Check out his curiously beautiful Onion Ring Fabric made by glueing together bright orange onion crisps with flexible glue:
….”The main problem I had was that I kept eating the rings.”
Look around you. What will you ‘speed create’ today?
Related posts: dominic wilcox’s solutions for the ‘everyday’
‘what’s not wrong?’ and other ways to start your day
calder’s improvised life: iron garden chair barbeque grill
‘where good ideas come from’
