365 Jars

Kirsty Hall in Bristol, England is spending a year making 365 Jars. She explains, "Every day during 2011, I’m going for a walk where I release an art jar into the wild for people to find. The jars are documented on the blog, usually daily. To my great delight, people have enthusiastically entered into the spirit of the project by reporting their finds and some have even been repositioning the jars for others to find."

Why did you decide to do this project? The original impetus came from a desire to do more walking. I knew that if I made walking into an art project, I would actually do it! I considered many ideas for combining art with walking before deciding that I would place art in the wild for people to find.

I’d also been feeling that my art was being pushed out by other things and I wanted to make it more central to my life. I’d done a daily project in 2007 called The Diary Project and I knew that daily making really gets things moving creatively.

I decided to use jars because I knew it would provide a coherent thematic framework for what could otherwise be quite disparate pieces of art. On a practical level, the jars also provide much-needed protection, which allows me to use a wider range of materials, even fragile ones like paper.

How has doing a yearlong/daily project affected your life? It’s completely taken over!

This is an epic project. It takes a bare minimum of 2 hours every single day and it’s usually much more. I knew it would be a big commitment but when I was estimating how much time it would take, I foolishly didn’t count all the admin and documentation that surrounds it. Fortunately I’m a full time artist, so I’m able to give it the attention it needs but it has been a strain at times and I’m looking at ways to make the project more sustainable throughout the year.

I am enjoying it though and I’ve got lots of rabid jar fans who cheer me on, which helps immensely.

See all of Kirsty's jars HERE.