About This Place - kdrae log

Hi! Welcome~

This is Katherine Rae Diemert’s blog– nice to meet you, if you’re new, and nice to see you, if I know you! I’ve started this site at the beginning of 2023– in 2022 I began to utilize my Newsletter more, and found that I really enjoyed bringing writing into my artistic practise, both for works in progress and reflections afterwards. Much of these, however, were fairly long-form pieces that came after the work had already been done. What I want to explore here are more regular, and hopefully shorter and less edited, ‘logs’ that can serve as documentation for my thinking and in-progress work. I’m borrowing the word ‘log’ from developer’s logs, a practice where programmers would document their changes to a piece of code, in part to document their thinking for others, but also to trace back possible causes if they encounter a bug.

‘Responses’ are in part from a school project I assigned my students and my self as part of a class I was teaching in winter 2023. This is where I’m responding in some way to media external from myself. You can read a bit more about it in this log, but here’s the jist of it:

[this is] A practice in recording your thoughts in response to material and developing ideas. A practice in that it is a repeated exercise, hopefully one that becomes habitual– small, consistent tasks throughout the semester.

Themes

Finally, as I go a few themes are emerging in my writing, as you can see from the tags. If you want to see the full list and breakdown, you can find them here. Here’s a little about some common ones: (ongoing):

making - I’m very interested in the differences between making artwork and experiencing an artwork. The process vs. the product.
teaching - I began teaching as a partial-load professor at Sheridan College’s Illustration program in fall 2020 to winter 2023. It’s immensely challenging, but I love it. There’s so much at play, and so much to experiment and hopefully get better at.
drawing - I studies illustration as an undergraduate student, and since then have had many ups and downs in my relationship with drawing. I do think of it as a foundational part of my practice, even in pieces that are far from the ‘2D’ picture.
project - for posts about a (usually) complete project or piece I worked on and/or created.

Disclaimer

I have a collection of disclaimers– but in general if you see the following, it means the post you’re reading may not be fully-flesher out or complete… or may end on a cliffhanger!

This is a work-in-progress post. I’d like to come back and tend to this as I go. In the meantime, you’re welcome to explore whatever is here so far. 🌱

In general, this entire blog is a work-in-progress: a series of braids, some tightly inter-woven and others fraying. I hope you’ll grant me a bit of leeway– but also that you may find something her useful, interesting, or even inspirational.