Cranium Condominiums

Michelle Roebuck in Georgia is doing a yearlong project she calls Cranium Condominiums. She explains it as "A Year of Our Family's Daily Artistic Adventures – A family of four endeavors to share their daily artistic creations."...

Yes, this is a literal banana hammock.


Why did you decide to do this project? In our home, someone’s always making something: Lego creations, crocheted sundries, paintings large and small, and “performance art”. When I received your book, 365: A Daily Creativity Journal, for Christmas 2011, it only seemed natural to give it a go! We started on an arbitrary day [gasp] and we don’t stress ourselves out over doing things “perfectly” (a tendency every member of our family shares in common). I am posting an art piece daily that will consist of my spontaneous interpretation the book’s prompts while my son Noah (7 years old) has chosen to post weekly. My husband and younger son may be convinced to do cameos during the course of the year. I allow myself to investigate the next day’s prompt only when I’ve finished and posted the current day’s project so I don’t have too much time to fret over it.




How has doing a yearlong/daily project affected your life? Rather than stressing over every detail of every single project, wondering and worrying whether I’d done it the best I possibly could, followed all the “rules” to the letter, tweaked, honed and perfected each minute consideration, I decided that this could allow me freedom from the strictures in my head. The name for the project, Cranium Condominiums, is a concept I’ve carried around for more than a decade to describe all the myriad ideas that reside in my dome, for they each have their own space uniquely suited to them yet they’re all part of the larger body of “my art”… Whether written, sculpted, shaped, formed, hooked, drawn or spoken, they all had their genesis within me. This is my opportunity to prove to myself that I do have plenty of “finished” works even as I learn to appreciate the creation process more. It was particularly stunning to me when, for the Day 5 piece, I pulled out my collection of creative writing journals, which I began keeping in 1993, and began laying them out to photograph… There were SO MANY! What’s pictured doesn’t even cover them all… And I worry myself over whether or not I’m a “writer”. HA!



See all of Michelle's family's adventures HERE.

1 comment:

Kit said...

These are awesome! I love the spontaneous, relaxed way they interpret the prompts. That really is a super way to simply get more creative and invite art into our lives.