The Dates in a Life Walking Project 2025 is a year-long painting documenting the number of steps I walked each day. I have documented my steps in paintings since 2016.

I prefer to walk for exercise, as time permits, outside in addition to whatever other walking I do as I go about my day. My goal is to walk as much as I can every day. I use the Pedometer app on my iPhone to document my steps.

The base monoprinted grid is Caribbean Breeze, with Iridescent Bright Gold background paint used to signify the days (mostly weekends, but also including holidays, vacations days, and sick days) I was not at work, which usually gives me more time to walk for exercise than the days I am at work.

Under some individual days, there is a painted line of color to represent reasons that may lower or raise the number of steps I walked that day, such as snow, rainy, extreme hot or cold, illness, and vacation.

I use a system of symbols to represent each thousand steps. Instead of showing exactly how many I walk. The black icons represent up to 9999 steps walked each day, red represents 10,000-19,999 steps and yellow represents 20,000-29,999 steps.

In February, there are 12 days in the second and third week where I outlined the icons that day in Teal, to represent why I didn't walk more than usual. On Super Bowl Sunday I fell very hard on black ice. While I didn't break anything, I had soft tissue bruising for over two months. For a few weeks I was either in too much pain to walk or was very afraid to walk outside due to ice. 

The four days where the icons are four vertical lines (IIII), I only walked 1000 steps. I have never in nine years walked that little, even after donating my kidney, when I had to walk a mile in the hospital, which is 2300+ steps.

On the last Sunday in September, I sprained my ankle when walking on an uneven path. Klutzy me once again injuring my right foot for the second time since May 2023. The green dots on the last three days reflect that injury, similar how I marked it in 2023 because it limited my walking for exercise.

A month later, after having a MRI, I found out that I actually fractured some bones in my foot, it wasn’t a sprain. After meeting with a podiatrist, I was told to limit my walking to under 2 miles a day for at least the next month, and to wear hiking boots for support. To mark my walking limitation, I started to use the same green paint as the dots, but to mostly cover the black icon design.

The painting is created with monoprinted textures of a construction fence as the background, handstamped rubber erasers on fabric which are collaged on the background grid, as well as handpainting and stitching on stiffened fabric.