Daily dawn project (take 3)

This article was adapted from an article originally published on my website.

I started my first Daily Dawn Project going into an optimistic summer between lockdowns in Melbourne, in the house we’re currently housesitting.

I needed to do something. After almost a year of Covid and lockdowns, I was flat. I was spending too much time on social media and doom scrolling the Guardian live news blog, with its daily case numbers that always left a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach.

I was spending practically no time at all creating art, despite telling everyone that that was what I wanted to do with my life.

I came up with the idea for the Daily Dawn Project a few years ago. It just popped into my head. Just strolled right in there and didn’t leave.

I used to be the opposite of a morning person. I’ve always loved a sleep in. So the concept of this project filled me with nausea and unease.

But it was also appealing.

The idea of a few hours of solitude in the morning, before everyone else is up, before the demands of work begin, to do whatever it is that I deem most important in my life. Uninterrupted time and focus.

I made the commitment and started my project. I deliberately made the rules flexible because I knew there would be moments of failure. An alarm doesn’t go off, sickness, travelling. I’m the type of person who will make a bunch of new year’s resolutions and then miss one day and give up because it’s no longer perfect.

Taking the motto that ‘perfect is the enemy of good’, I chose to forgive missed days and make sure I was continuing even if mistakes were made.

We were in lockdown again. It was dark and cold and draughty in our Fitzroy townhouse.

I missed one day. Then two. Then a week.

Eventually I gave up.

It wasn’t wasted time though. I began to really appreciate the quiet of the early morning. I discovered that my creative brain enjoys that period before it’s fully awake to create. That the censor inside me is too sleepy to do much at that point, so I don’t need to fight it to get started.

I watched over 100 different variations of the sky changing from deep, dark blue to light.

There were a few very helpful differences this time.

The first is that it was warm. I was living in tropical French Polynesia, where the weather rarely dips below 20ºC. That’s one thing that’s very helpful in rolling out of a comfy bed in the morning.

The second is siestas. I fully embraced the afternoon nap to assist with the 4:30am start time.

The third are the sunrises over Tahiti. They are not always magnificent, but most of the time they are. Pink and orange, streaks of light over the water, the mountains turning from black to gold. It’s beautiful and inspiring.

I fell pregnant with Auguste and my second attempt at waking up at dawn fell to the side as I dealt with exhaustion and morning sickness.

It’s been 3 years since then.

3 years of interrupted sleep due to pregnancy, breastfeeding, teething and the occasional sickness. Finally my children are starting to sleep with more consistency, and their papa does the small number of night time wake-ups.

So…

It feels right that we’re back in the house where it all began, in Fitzroy, in the dead of winter. I crawled out of bed at first light to make a cup of tea and draw some St Kilda shells. Auguste heard me pottering around and decided to get up to join me, which made things a little more challenging; he wanted to draw on the same page as me and didn’t understand why I wasn’t so keen on that.

1 day down, 364 to go!

Wish me luck, and let me know in the comments if you want to start your own creative morning project.

Making art versus making noise

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July 31, 2024

I’m thinking these days about the modern art practice, and how so much of it has become a performance piece for social media.