Today is as good as any day to start. Probably better than most, as the universe seems hellbent on prodding me into this.
A piece of hardware storing something like 17 years of art files and other documents died yesterday. And, if it wasn’t for a dusty back-up drive, I would have lost everything. Instead, I lost only some. It was a reminder of how futile it is to preserve things. And also, that even a flawed effort is better than none.
That brings me to this site. For a few years now, I’ve wanted to write more about my life as an artist, maker, collector of ideas and so forth. As I get older, I find myself feeling that so much of my life is at risk of getting lost or destroyed or becoming frozen in some piece of bricked hardware… that if I don’t make the effort to share about it, no one will think to ask about it. The “Museum of Stirling” is my, undoubtedly shameful and surely shameless, effort to share some of whatever I can.
The larval idea for the “Museum of Stirling” grew out of a Christmas season spent with a stack of boxes my parents demanded I take home from their house. It was crammed with stuff from middle-school straight through to my early university days: notebooks, pictures, broken toys, dioramas, old wallets, unsent love letters, that kind of stuff. For some reason, I also felt that this was an important enough collection of personal artifacts to share with the world.
As I documented the boxes’ contents – taking photos and rendering short stories for Instagram – I realised how I rarely I share about myself, my art, and my effort to be a living breathing human. I also noticed how little room in social media there was to deeply talk about any of that.
The Museum of Stirling is my attempt to rectify this. This website will be a site of documentation for my past work and a hub for exploring my current efforts, as well as the inspirations and thinking that drive them.
Welcome to the Museum of Stirling.