a life in the day.

Artist Statement

My project, “A Life in the Day”, is a narrative story based on the succession of events I am likely to experience in a twenty-four hour period. The antecdotes are all true, but I pieced them together on a twenty-four time frame that suited my project. Being a somewhat backwards, nocturnal creature, my story begins in the night, carries through a dream sequence, morning, and eventually progresses to the beginning of the next night. My intention for this piece was to portray the everyday as the structure which accommodates the multi-dimensional universe of thoughts and feelings character to each individual. Thoughts and feelings are the stuff of which personal mythologies are made and, as with all mythologies, personal mythologies are not without themes. In the creation of my project, I came in closer contact with the nature of my own theme, as shortly after my writing process had begun, my present mental preoccupations became evident to me.  I thus came to regard this piece as a meditation on my relationship with change and letting go, and how these concepts gravitate from ominous to comforting over time.
I struggled a bit in my work, as I initially thought the time limit was ten minutes long. There is a slight choppiness in certain points of the audio, as I had to selectively cut out two and a half minutes of excess dialogue with software that is more or less foreign to me. It was a tedious process, but I’m ultimately grateful for the shorter time limit, because it forced me to trim and sculpt my work into something that is I feel is less embarrassing.  Ultimately, I found the creation of this piece to be a rewarding process of growth, and I’m grateful for the insights that it revealed to me.

Artist Bio

Salut, my name is Jillian Fennessy. I moved around various towns in Michigan and Indiana while growing up and never designated one of them as my “hometown”. I traveled for a few years once I turned eighteen, and moved to Olympia two years ago. I am a junior at The Evergreen State College, but since I did not get here by making any plans, I haven’t really made any plans for what I am doing in school. Or after school. I strive to keep growing and to do what interests me at the time and this has always seemed to take me where I need to go. I have written, basically, my whole life, mostly short stories, poems, and song lyrics. My need to write is one characteristic about myself that I have found to be consistent. I haven’t decided what I want to do after Evergreen – that is still over a year away, though I’m going to work on becoming a certified ESL teacher so I might have the option of leaving the country for a while after graduation. .