Nikki McClure has been making her annual calendar since 1998.
Her calendars have become a staple in kitchens, offices and schools. Each image is an original papercut, cut with an x-acto knife from a single piece of black construction paper.
Nikki features strong images of everyday life, each associated with a powerful verb that acts to inspire; a call to action or reason to reflect.
We sat down with her to talk about her process on the 2014 calendar.
Here we are in August, and it is a hot 85° in Olympia, Washington right now. Your 2014 calendar will start coming back from the press next week, effectively five months before anyone can actually use it as a calendar. Tell me, when did you start working on it?
I am always working on the calendar somewhere in the back of my mind, but I don’t sit down and start making pictures until late winter.
That’s a long time.
This is mostly because I have been working on making a book Fall-Winter-Spring and then once the art for the book is done, I can start the calendar.
I usually start cutting about 12 weeks before I hope to print. Not much time to spare, but I make it work when there is a deadline.
Like a lot of us, if there’s no deadline... you take longer?
It’s true! When there is no deadline, work comes much more slowly; there are berries to pick, bike rides, and swimming to distract me. But as an artist making images from her life, that counts as work too!
Of course it does. How do you keep track of things in your head, when you’re working on a spring image — like this year’s DELEGATE — when it’s winter?
It is hard to keep track of time.
I’m already in 2014. Images I made this spring wont be seen until December of 2014. So, I kind of live in the future a bit.
This year’s calendar is called Home, yet it features a couple pushing off from a barnacle-covered rock. My guess is it isn’t called Home for the people, but for something else.
It’s called Home for whatever reason you want it to be called that, whatever Home means to you.
I almost titled this collection Inhabit instead of Home. Inhabit is to reside, to dwell, to live in, but not to live with and to live for. Home is so much more.
Home is everything.
I hear a truck pulling up?
Oh!! UPS! I love the sound of the UPS truck. I can tell a UPS truck from other trucks, even when I’m in town. A book arrived! I’ll be back.
Nikki ran down to the UPS truck, greeting the driver by name and taking her package.
So, yes, Home. Barnacles. UPS. Books.
Cementing down and accepting of what will happen from your decisions.
Plus it is animal homes, living with and beside.
This year’s calendar is the first time you’ve explained some of your process inside the calendar itself. There’s a sort of artist-statement.
There is a note inside that gives a glimpse into my thinking behind the artwork. But just a glimpse!
I really want the pictures to resonate differently in each person.
You get to make up your own story.
I have mine: you have yours. And we both might get excited by UPS truck idling outside.
One thing that’s really powerful about the calendar is the narrative it tells when you read the images in order, and this year the calendar almost comes full circle, with December’s Stay featuring the same location as Home, but with a different emphasis.
Originally, the image for the cover was going to be Stay, but it felt rather lonely.
The people aren’t there. Maybe they are coming back, maybe not, maybe lost at sea?
So I made a new image, Home, for the cover showing my son pushing us off into a new adventure, bare feet and all.
Home is cementing down and giving it your all to survive.
Plus, there won’t be another calendar with barnacles on the cover, unless it’s by Jill Bliss. It should make people curious.
