So we are getting closer to the end of the year and i don’t know about anyone else but this year has flown! Here in Australia we have a horse race, the Melbourne cup, and for me it acts as my gateway into Christmas and the end of the school year preparations. It also serves as a time for reflection and visions for the upcoming year.

I have many aspirations creatively, probably too many! But for the next year many creative aspiration will be intertwined with personal ones as the next year will close many chapters of my families life and open new opportunities! 

The largest is the finishing of a house that has taken two and a half years to build and another 5 years before that to plan (we moved into this house, before we knocked it down). For me when we moved into this new house 7 and a half years ago, it meant that my husband and I put many of our belongings in storage (books, my film camera, kitchen stuff which will be thrown out, unopened wedding presents… we have been married 10 years!). And since then it has felt that certain aspects of our life has been in “storage” (figuratively and literally!) on hold, waiting. It has been amazing to think that this has continued for seven years, most of one child’s life and all of the other child’s. It will be interesting to finally go through all the things I decided to store away and see what I want to resurrect and what I will say goodbye to. Will read the “Life Changing Magic of Cleaning up” by Marie Kondo! I aim to have ALL the boxes emptied by Easter and we can finally get on with life! To not have to be physically available to make decisions on the house (although my husband has been amazing) and not have these decisions cloud the mind!

However this storage period has been good for me creatively as I was able to try different genres that I was interested in and to understand what genres are in my reach (I might love fashion photography, but having children makes it really hard to organise photo shoots on a regular basis- but I gained many skills from fashion photography. Networking, photographing the clothes, styling the shoot, retouching, submitting… many things!). I worked out fine art photography allows me to be the most “selfish” with my time!

The other upheaval this year was both children starting a new school (one their first year). So there was a transition to being a “school mum” and including the kids in school activities (including 15 birthday parties to date!). The transitioned beautifully and hopefully this year this will all die down, so I will have more time to concentrate on my art.

So with this all in mind my goals for 2019 is:

- To experiment with social media to get more customers into my husbands business.

- Finalise pricing and to have fine art prints set up on Etsy and on my website. Also to create a workflow that allows access to the pictures seamless. It is created, now need to do the initial set up!

- Have a portfolio ready to submit to Archangel and Trevillion. I have decided to start a lot of this from scratch to get more appropriate pictures for this format and to be more organised in having releases readily accessible.

- Progress in my fine art painting. This was one aspect of my life that I did pack away 7 years ago and a regretted. I finally had enough this year and I started again… it will take a while to get back where I liked, but will be fun! 

- Progress on my fine art series on Deities and continually showing women as strong sensual beings, transcending gender norms that surrounds us in todays society. Also combining painting and photography and different ways! Hopefully beginning to look for galleries that can show this!