In 2021, I posted a series of short prose poems every day on Instagram. I wanted to push myself creatively with as little as possible, intending to do the project for 100 days. I stopped at 50 because my freelance practice took off and I thought no one would notice.

It made such a big difference in my creative practice in ways that was hard to pinpoint at the time, but looking back, it felt like a turning point. The way I failed though meant that I hesitated to start another 100 day project for a few years. This year, I'm doing it.

Below, a sequence of ideas, images, and notes behind the conception of "One Thing Led To Another", which you can view here, updated live daily from March 3 to June 11.

1

I've been using gradients in my work for several years now. They've always seemed like a convenient yet resonant part of my creative toolkit. Easy to make, figuratively rich. A seamless integration of colour and minimalism. 

And of course, I'm not the only one. Gradients in graphic design and art have been incredibly popular and dare I say, trendy. A few in my mood board:

John Pawson, Spectrum

Sho Shibuya, Sunrise from a Small Window

Jerr
Jerry-Lee Bosmans via Instagram

Ombre tulle fabric via FabricTrims, Etsy

Jeffrey Simmons Studio, Gravity Well VI

Kendall Jenner's $750,000 James Turrell light sculpture

2

I almost became a motivational speaker. Just kidding, but here's the story. When I left my job at a unicorn tech company in 2019, I narrowly evaded having to give a speech. For three years, I had attended company conferences in Ottawa, Kingston, and in my own city, and watched my peers get on stage. And somehow, it was introverted me's turn. I had titled the speech "subject to change", a response to the breakneck rate of change that comes furious and often disorienting within fast-growing companies. This was three years after I interviewed, during which I had answered "I am changing" to the very vague question that I think got me the job. It was true. The ground beneath me on which I had built my entire foundation on, was shifting. And I didn't know who or what I was.

3

For years, I'd only read books that promised me a tangible result or benefit. Ie. be more productive, make more money. The biggest change I've made in my life is start to read 100 books a year (also in 2021; it was a renaissance year for me). I started to read about things I'd always been curious about but had zero relevance to my career. I wanted to be a bit more knowledgeable about the world outside of personal experience and excelling at work. So I finally learned about poetry and economics and art history. Most recently, I've taken up quantum physics. I knew it'd be a challenge to grasp because as much as quantum physics has been the subject of or periphery of Hollywood movies, I just didn't get it. I didn't understand.

Like, what does a James Bond movie and Antman have to do with the universe?

4

From the book, "Poetry as Spellcasting", Dominique Matti says:

"Poetry is not the scientific report purporting how aromatic plants impact the vagus nerve, but the slow-exhaling shoulder-drop after a deep puff of lavender."

You have to experience it to really get it. I'd come to the conclusion that asking "What does it mean?" isn't exactly the right question when it comes to poetry. And maybe the point of it isn't to understand but to be moved anyway. I'd spent the biggest chunk of my leisure time from 2022-2024 working on my Substack all about and for poetry, and the longer I was building my consistency muscle, the further it seemed I was moving away from my original thesis until my last few posts read like someone live documenting their descent into the wonderland and hellhole of art-making.

5

"The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend." -novelist Robertson Davies

For a long time, I had this thought in my head: Why wasn't there ever realistic art until fairly recently? Could people not see as well as we do now? Art and science and human perception have always been closely interlinked. We didn't always have an understanding of perspective and space. So of course, we couldn't paint or draw that way. In the grand scheme of things, we have only recently shifted our entire perspective of existence, from one completely centred around us to being mere specks suspended in space.

I wouldn't be surprised if the search for meaning was correlated to the scientific revolution and what it has shown us about our place in the universe. The more we learn, the smaller we feel. 

6

Once upon a time, I learned in school that atoms, made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons, were the smallest thing in the universe, and that they are the building blocks of everything. They aren't. There are more forces at play. Quantum means the smallest possible amount of something. Quantum physics is the study of what happens below the atomic level. A lot, it appears, is happening in/with our new smallest possible units. I've been wondering about scale. How much power and possibility can be packed into small and convenient things. How zooming out can make us, our problems, our lives feel so tiny. 

7

An artist friend who I admire once told me that I seem to have a knack with small projects and I didn't know how to take it at the time. It fed into my insecurities, that I'm wholly incapable of making significant work. I have too many weaknesses to know where to begin to tackle any of those, so I have learned by now to lean in the direction of my strengths and even more tellingly, my compulsions, however little I understand them. I've been writing micro-prose for a very long time. Every time I wanted to move my career in a more creative direction, I have somehow subconsciously decided to start the process by writing little prose "poems". I did this in 2021 (colour stories) and in 2011 (fashion stories). I thought by now, I'd be onto "bigger and better" things. Guess not.

8

A gradient isn't just one colour blending into another. In mathematics, it's the rate of change.

In the book, The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity, author and neuroscientist Bobby Azarian references the phrase, "Nature abhors a gradient", a play on "Nature abhors a vacuum" by Aristotle. He uses it to explain that whenever two different states of matter interact, stasis is impossible. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that any difference—whether in temperature, pressure, chemical concentration, or electrical charge—will automatically begin to decrease, closing the gap.

The tendency to close gaps isn’t just a law of physics—it’s a pattern that plays out in nature, people, and even design trends.

Gradients might be more popular than ever because a) technology makes it easier to produce them and b) we are, consciously or subconsciously, intuiting something about the world around us and ourselves, expressing both our desire—and the natural order of things—toward change. 

9

So that's how One Thing Led To Another.