Year End Wrap-Up!
A look back on 2024 in preparation for 2025
Reading time: about 7 minutes
I’ve been reading Shannon Downey’s book, Let’s Move the Needle: An Activism Handbook for Artists, Crafters, Creatives and Makers. In it, she tells the story of how she came up with the #MakeDontBreak challenge for 2021. She begins by talking about the way people often approach the New Year as if one year ending and another beginning creates a clean slate, even though this is obviously not how flipping a calendar works. As Shannon puts it, so pointedly:
“Nothing was going to change simply because the calendar flipped from 2020 to 2021. I was concerned about the impact that would have on the mental health and motivation of folks who were focusing on 2021 as the solution for the shit show that was our current lives.”
Like Shannon, this bothers me because it is a way folks set themselves up for disappointment and a real crash in their emotional state when, come January 2nd or 5th or 10th, nothing in their lives is particularly different. In the context Shannon is writing about, she is addressing the way we look forward to the next year, but it can just as easily be applied to how we look back on the year ending.
A year is a long time. There is no way that an entire year is 100% only bad all 24 hours of all 365 days. Nothing is only one way. Some years can be harder than others, for sure. But the notion of a ‘bad’ year or a ‘good’ year really misses the fullness of our lives and what happens over four seasons of change and growth.
2024 was rough in a lot of ways, personally and collectively. I felt great joy alongside some of the deepest despair. I felt gratitude and ease as well as grief and rage. I struggled for days at a time, and I had days where I was able to connect with others and make amazing, beautiful things. There were parts of this year that were harder than anything I have ever experienced before. And this year has also been an absolute gift of collaborations and community building.
So, without further ado, a little wrap-up of all the projects of 2024 and where each one is at as I go into the New Gregorian Year…
From the QILT2BAG+: A Collaborative Community ‘Zine
In December of 2023 I got the idea to produce a ‘zine and quickly reached out to several folks with whom I wanted to collaborate. By January I had decided I would produce four issues using funds from my art commission and the small amount I get from Substack subscriptions.1 I did this, successfully, partnering with fifteen other queer folks to showcase our writing, art, and photography.
In September I decided I definitely wanted to produce four more issues, so in October I set up a crowdfunding campaign to cover the costs. The campaign was fully funded by 30 contributors by the third week. All the contributors for each new issue are confirmed as of November 2024, and there is already cover art for issue five! Everyone who backed the campaign will get their issues in May 2025.2
Sacred Love/Sacred Lives
I completed fifteen more pieces total in this series, two of which were collaborations with other artists. In 2023 I did nineteen of them, so my pacing was a bit slower this year. This was largely because most of the Spring I was going through a mental health crisis brought on by medication I should never have taken. That being said, working on these was one of the few things I could manage easily when I was feeling my worst, so yay for having this No Timeline project!
I am still aiming to complete 108 in total, and hoping I can get closer to twenty done in 2025. I currently have five in progress, one new collaboration to start on, and about seven more design ideas of my own. At this point I have completed thirty-five pieces.
CAD Art talk, Grant & An Artist Residency!
This year I applied for two grants and an opportunity to lead a workshop through Calgary Arts Development. I didn’t get selected for the workshop, but they liked my pitch enough to invite me, along with six other artists, to give a talk just this month about my artistic practice and how it connects to social change. It was a fun morning of meeting other socially engaged artists and writers, plus it was a paid gig!
And I got one of the grants! My first one ever! It’s not a huge amount, but it’s enough for a residency I applied for. I am using it to bring together a little cohort of other 2SLGBTQIA+ creators to share the residency space for the month of January. I am super excited to have this to look forward to now that winter has set in properly. It will be a great way to get me out of the house during one of the coldest months of the year, and a fun way to keep growing my artistic community.
Thangka Artwork!
By far one of the greatest accomplishments for 2024 was finishing the Thousand-Armed Avalokiteshvara. They are now in North Carolina at the campus where they will be put on display. This was a really intense practice to have for fourteen months, and one that continues on. Throughout the next year I want to write letters to all the ancestors represented in the galaxy surrounding Avalokiteshvara, as well as putting together a digital guide to the symbols I chose for the piece.
In the last few months of 2024, I began work again on three other thangkas that I’d started earlier in the year, when I was still full of energy and my brain hadn’t gotten super spicy: Ekajati, Green Tara and Princess Mandarava. As with Sacred Love/Sacred Lives, these have no particular deadline. I am working on them most days, for a little at a time, when inspiration takes me. I hope to spend a great deal of time on them during my January artist residency.
An As Of Yet Semi-Secret Project
I am currently doing the writing part for a graphic novel. I’m not sharing about it much yet because…*drumroll* the artist and I will be meeting with a book agent early in 2025 and neither of us want to get too ahead of things until we find out if the project has a chance of getting picked up by a publishing house. But… OH EM GEE. We will be meeting with an agent soon. An Actual Proper Does This For a Living Book Agent.
Be still my little writer’s heart that has been dreaming of this since I was five.
So that’s my 2024 project overview and wrap-up!
It was a year of great joy and accomplishments, despite several weeks lost to high anxiety and the incompetence of a healthcare system ill-suited to supporting mental health.
I am grateful for all the support I have had from friends and family, and for fellow artists and writers and my growing community. I am grateful that I was able to pull back from projects when I needed to, and have had the energy and capacity to connect again when I was ready. I am especially grateful for how my community sustains me in the face of the psychological weight of being human and bearing witness to some of the worst violence of our lifetimes. In the face of regressive anti-trans legislation, genocide, and increasingly alarming global warming, I have been able to make it through because of the love and care of dozens of people.
We take care of us and making art and writing our stories is part of that.
K.
What are projects you are enjoying, old or new? What happened this last year that was new and good and nourishing? What are you preparing for in the coming year and how are you building and sustaining community?
Watch this space in January for my annual financial review blog post, in which I give a run down on the Cost of Being an Artist and a Writer.
This is of course, in the hopes that the Canada Postal service gets serious about negotiating with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and backing their Very Cool Community Power proposal. Check it out. It’s amazing and yes, this is the future I want!
Congrats on all your work this year, Kait! I enjoyed this wrap up, and I’m glad I could help contribute to one of your projects.
Your year has been amazing, just like you! Excited to see what is creatively in store for you next year 😄