6 Artists Who Use Diaries

Molly Soda

Diaries and journals and similar forms have interested me for a long time. I find myself using books and post-its and cutesy notebooks all the time. I love the personal/intimate feel of them. The casualness of a private world of my own daily drawings and thoughts. I also, in a blogging context, have been habitually using the internet as an open diary for years, starting - in the proper sense - with Livejournal (although before that there was Myspace, Bebo, and Hi5, which had certain diary-like elements). There are a number of artists who use some kind of diary format, many of whom have inspired me, so I want to talk about some of them and pinpoint their nuances and what about them individually I love.

1. Molly Soda

Molly Soda's work can be described as one big, exaggerated, kitschy internet diary, I guess. She uses webcam pictures and videos, glitter graphics, various digital artefacts, and her own vulnerable thoughts and feelings, and kinda smooshes all of this together across the internet in an intensely personal way. Her work is firmly situated amongst a wealth of cultural imagery from the 90s and 00s - the tentatively computerised childhoods and adolescences of people our age, There's something about that cultural element that I like a lot and relate to.

2. Lauren Poor

Lauren Poor's work is so busy and colourful, it's kinda like sifting through an attic of childhood memories. There's such intricacy and bright personality to everything. Lauren Poor seems to be collecting. A great big collector who collects everything, somehow. Collecting every single possible colour, maybe. I like that.

3. Le Cam Romain

Looking at LE CAM ROMAIN stuff is like looking at the whole world at once. This is a very concise world of photographic diary. Everything is pristine and beautiful. Every picture feels as big as a country. This is the vastness of a single moment expressed perfectly.

4. Ayesha Tan Jones

Like Le Cam Romain, Ayesha Tan Jones has a photographic diary, but hers is less polished and fairy-like. She has a fascinating focus on her everyday world. I find it so compelling, and I could scroll through her photos for hours. I think some of the appeal is that I know these are things that I might see, maybe, on a normal day in my life, or that I could make them happen, but they are still so cool and expressive and rich. There's a whole life in every picture, and that could be my life too.

5. Mogu Takahashi

Mogu Takahashi is such a big influence because when I look at her work I feel totally free and happy. She doesn't seem to make her art by any rules, she just makes shapes and has fun. She keeps ongoing sketchbooks and periodically makes videos of herself flipping through them. There's a great sense of carefree enjoyment of her time, which is pretty much the main thing that I want in my life.

6. Kendra Yee

Kendra Yee draws strangely shaped people and sprawling patterns. There's a great fantasy/dreamland feel to a lot of her work, and I get the sense that she uses drawings as a way of figuring herself out, reassuring herself, and celebrating new discoveries. I chose the picture above specifically because it's a wonderfully positive diary entry. I know I've written a lot of similar things in my diaries because I purposefully try to use them as a way of recording my progress and praising myself for it. It's one way to use diaries as a type of therapeutic self-support system.