What a year.
Things were going ok for the first ten or so weeks – I bit the bullet an began gearing up to do some welding, to finally make a push to get some sculpture done. I was offered another arts residency, which would be a wonderful expansion of Noosa Mnemonic, in cooperation with the local regional art gallery…
…then the plague hit, and hit HARD.
By week 12 we entered a kind of non-time, in which things drifted and became unfixed. Public events went away, my residency was cancelled. So I ploughed ahead with my home welding setup, and designing the Studio-in-a-box.
I received an Arts Qld grant that covered my costs for the Studio-in-a-box, which was also a nice little notch to add to the artist’s cv. A big part of this year was figuring out quantity surveying for materials, and mapping out cut-charts for steel lengths.
There were some big upgrades for my protective clothing kit this year – with a new powered respirator welding helmet, and an (as-yet untested) powered water-cooling suit. When all this stuff is combined, I should be kitted up like an astronaut, and able to work safely and comfortably in more or less any conditions.
I solved a problem of flakey power supply during the storm season, by dropping a bunch of cash on a honking great UPS.
In photography my processes had some issues to overcome, adapting to a new photo processing / management tool. It produces better images, but has worse management features. So I’m effectively now working in two apps. I also updated my monitor configuration for my workstation to 3 screens. Sadly, these changes really didn’t work out too well – 2020 is definitely the year I fell out with technology. I have to learn to not allow anyone to provide an “ecosystem” to me, and instead build one myself.
I finished an update to The Metaning, which frees it from Apple Books, and a European publishing standards group released an Ebook reader for Mac, Linux & Windows that can read the fixed-layout EPUB format, so that clears the way for me to ditch Apple for selling my books, and move to direct sales.
The other major thing this year, was 15 minutes of fame, after a tweet thread I started about my time in high school was picked up and retweeted by a bunch of folks. Had a lot of people relating to me their childhood horrors from the same school.
Overall, 2020 was a year in which a lot of long-term plans and strategies played out, and produced results that weren’t all I’d hoped. Of course, across everything hangs the pall of Covid, so it’s hard to put the achievements of the year in any greater context of where I thought I’d be by the end of it.