I lead a pretty active lifestyle. Although that makes it seem like I get up at 6 every morning to jog and then make myself a kale smoothie, which is definitely not the case. I mean I’m active with what I do, and I tend to throw myself into physical things very wholeheartedly. I hesitate to throw around the term tomboy, since my lipstick collection and disdain for unnecessarily gendering activities kinda negates that, but as a child I heard that term more than once. Ive had a lot of skinned knees in my time, and a few weeks ago I got my first ever black eye. But that terms a bit of a stretch, it was a teeny bruise in the crease of my eyelid from when I hit myself with my own boxing glove during training, no glorious story to go along with it. Anyway, the point is I was at work and I looked down at my fingers working the register and I had a burn from making quiches. My mind wandered, as it does at work, and I started cataloguing all the marks I had at that point. My burn, the bruise on my eye, a nick on my leg from shaving, not to mention all the miscellaneous bruises and scratches I’ve had in the past. Reading back over this I’m making it sound like I’m a walking crash test dummy, but the reality is this is just what happens over the course of a lifetime. You get scratches from your dog when he jumps up at you, you burn yourself on the oven, you get stretch marks from growing, bruises from bumping your shin. Your skin is a catalogue of the passage of time on your body, and these marks, however temporary, show how you’ve lived. I want to be able to capture this, to show over the course of a year a snapshot of my life through the marks I collect on my skin. Bruises, sunburn, scratches, freckles, stretch marks, mosquito bites, those red lines from wearing jeans that are too tight, the works. Its ambitious, Ive already run into problems since my camera doesn’t have a screen I can flip around and enlisting my mums help ended in disaster as she failed to press the record button properly. For a long term project like this one I’ll need an easy recording device I can carry with me, and that I can easily use on myself. Im lucky I live in the era of smartphones. I know theres gunna be issues, and its an ambitious project, but already its changing me, and how I look at my body. I got excited to see my stretch marks when I got out of the shower because it was something else I could add to my project. I hope this project, if nothing else, can help to put some of these marks that we look at with shame in a new light.