The Dates in a Life Walking Project 2024 is a year-long painting documenting the number of steps I walked each day. I have documented my steps in paintings since 2016.
I prefer to walk for exercise, as time permits, outside in addition to whatever other walking I do as I go about my day. My goal is to walk as much as I can every day. I use the Pedometer app on my iPhone to document my steps.
I use a system of symbols to represent each thousand steps. Instead of showing exactly how many I walk. The black icons represent up to 9999 steps walked each day, red represents 10,000-19,999 steps and yellow represents 20,000-29,999 steps.
The base monoprinted grid is violet. The Silver background paint shows the days I didn’t have, or make, time to walk for exercise, which lowered the number of steps I walked each day through June. In July, I switched to using Bronze because my work schedule and lunch break changed, which also affected my opportunity to walk at lunch time.
Underneath some individual days, there is a painted line of color to represent reasons that may lower or raise the number of steps I walked that day, such as snow, rainy, extreme hot or cold, illness, and vacation.
For April 8th (the second row on the left and to the right of the yellow icon for walking over 23,000 steps the day before), I documented when I saw the total solar eclipse in Watertown, NY by visually representing the 3 minutes and 22 seconds of totality.
I also walked 20,285 steps when visiting Seattle on November 25th and I walked 23,442 steps on December 31st, which also have yellow icons on those days.
The green dots in the middle of the icons indicate time healing from a foot injury which happened in May 2023.
I had Covid for the first time in June, and documented that by painting an overlay of positive Covid tests over the icons when I was sick or contagious. I did walk around my neighborhood those days but stayed away from other people.
The painting is created with monoprinted textures of a construction fence as the background, handstamped rubber erasers on fabric which are collaged on the background grid, as well as handpainting and stitching on stiffened fabric.
