Mary Adam, visual artist

The house is emptying out and the boxes are mounting up. There's still much to be done though. Trying to keep essential things like the fridge as long as possible.

There hasn't been much time for art, and besides, the tools and materials are increasingly packed away and inaccessible. But I've been doing some collage experiments or "doodling" in my sketchbook using bits of rejected collagraphs and linocuts. 

The packer came to assess and measure what we'd like to take with us. He said it would be between a quarter and a half of a container.

Afterwards I had a couple of hours in the studio, made a start on some Christmas cards for the Art Market on December 5th.  

Today seemed like progress. Two shelves and a cupboard emptied, some stuff discarded to the garbage (stacks of old VCR tapes recorded from the TV but never watched again) and a small amount kept to be shipped or given away. This includes a box of CDs which are computer backups. May never need them but not yet ready to throw them out.

Need to advertise again to get rid of more furniture.

Found the packer/shipper, they say they don't encourage people to ship to the UK by ocean freight because the laws are such in the ports that it's expensive and unpredictable. Unless you have a full container (which we definitely will not have) they said it might not be worth it and the shipment can be delayed for months while waiting for the container to fill up. I still want to get the quote, it would be drastic at this late stage to ship only things that can fit in a box. 

One-third of the 90 days is gone! Yesterday I cleared a small cupboard that was full of papers. It didn't look like much to begin with but turned into a major task. It took the whole day and at the end of it I had two garbage bags full of torn-up paper and a small box of things to keep. I don't think there are many more like that. Glad it's done. The plan is to clear all the cupboards and drawers first, because that's where the slow work is.

​Still have not found the contact information for the helpful packer/shipper I spoke with a few months ago, will have to resort back to the yellow pages. 

The video for the Collage course is only so-so. I' will redo it if possible. In the evening I did small trial of a possible composition while watching two re-run episodes of "The Good Wife". 

Aiming to wrap up some unfinished business before we leave -- today and yesterday I took time out to record a video for my planned online Collage class. I had recorded the videos for two earlier segments months ago and need the remaining segments to be filmed in the same setting/context if possible. This was a demo video and one of the criteria of success is that the work should come out reasonably well. I'm not sure yet if this is the case since I only finished it today. Will have a better idea tomorrow. 

This page was in a notebook from 2006. (I'm still at the stage of sifting through old journals and notebooks.) It was during a project on the four elements, and this was the first one, Earth. I was looking at a small rock in my hand and thinking about how rocks are used, searching for an idea for a painting.  

Found four more journals, 3" thick, which need to be gone through in order to select out the pages to keep. 

Also found a dead moth. It looked like an ordinary brown moth at first. Not so ordinary though, because there was a flash of colour when I picked it up and it turned out that, hidden under the brown forewings,  it had brilliant yellow hindwings with black stripes. It came up easily in Google with the keywords "moth hindwing yellow black" .  I've not seen it before but it's not rare or anything, it's just that the hindwings are surprising. In fact, the Wikipedia article says that the genus name, Catocala, roughly means "beautiful hindwings", and the genus (which contains many species) is usually called "Underwings" or "Underwing Moths".

Yesterday was a day of R&R. Fortunately I'd finished enough of the journal-sorting to set the table for lunch. I overcooked the chicken but we enjoyed it anyway.

Spent some time on the guests' Samsung tablet. The swiping and tapping confused me at first. I was just beginning to get the hang of it when the guests had to go. What a fabulous teaching-learning tool it is, well the internet really. With a pocket-sized tool like that and internet access, there's no limit or bar or hindrance of any kind to education. Especially this generation who are children now, I see why they're called "digital natives" and what the significance might be in 15 or 20 years. 

Almost finished sorting through the old folders, about 90% done. Anxious to get back to regular art work. September was all Open Studio, and October the house was up for sale and had to be kept tidy ALL the time, and then the garage sale, so I've done very little drawing or painting lately. However, I've been working on drawing hands in the evenings in front of the TV, and I made a small start on thinking about the art & time idea. There's also an ongoing collaborative project with my friend Marrissa Richards and some other Trinidadian artists, on the theme "Live it, Sketch it, Share it". My part is going along slowly. I brought it upstairs today so that I can continue working on it in the evenings. 

This is hard. I have many old journals packed with my own jottings, observations and ideas going back years, and doubt we'll have space to store them where we're going. So will I toss them out or what? Tough decisions. As well, I often find that I don't recognize the significance of something until hours or days later, a long reaction time which can result in discarding something I really should have kept. But like it or not I have to downsize, so what I'm doing is going through each folder and putting select pages into another folder of things to keep. It's taking time. Hope it will be worth it.