Sophie Ashdown

I have been telling myself for years that I need to simplify my life and yet I seem to be compelled to make it more complicated.

At work I have been trying hard to reduce my hours so I’d have more time for art but somehow recently my hours have been really high. Now some of this is not down to me. We had a key central person leave and his work got farmed out to various people while we search for a replacement, so I temporarily have more on my plate than usual.

When that replacement arrives there will initially be more work as we train him/her for the new role. Also there is a big piece of work that I do twice a year for the company that we are trying to automate so we have a developer working on it with us. However this has made the process much more complicated as he understands the issues and works to automate the solutions. What usually takes about four weeks is now on week nine. I have spent far too much time buried in spreadsheets and power queries. It is about as far from being artistic as I could be.

And yet! Somehow I have also had my head in spreadsheets for artistic reasons. I’m planning for my next piece of data art and it is taking a long time to prepare the data before making the art. I have in mind what I want the piece to look like but the data needs to be the right fit.

Previously I worked on the data first and made the art based on the structure of the data, which seemed to work.

This time I have an idea in my head of how I can artistically show the data, and now need to find the right data to fit.

Perhaps this is the wrong way around but as I’m in the early stages of making data art, I fell that I need to try different approaches.

Consequently I’m discovering that basing the art on data is both limiting and expanding how I approach the art. I’m limited by the structure of the data but I have all of these opportunities for different ways to create art with it. I’m not sure yet if I’m on the right path.

One thing I do know is that I have definitely not succeeded in simplifying my life!