100 Cuts in 100 Days—ongoing series

This is the project 100 Cuts in 100 Days. Every day from September 4th, 2025 through mid-December I will be posting some kind of cut image or object. It might be something complex, or it might be something as simple as a squiggle. It will depend on what my body can do that day.

Over the past year and a half I have learned what I can and cannot do. What I can do best is cut things. Since I did the project This Is What I Can Do I have gained two new chronic conditions to go with my epilepsy and essential tremors (shaking of the hands and head). So now the question is: how much can I do? What can one accomplish in slices of time? What can one put together with scissors and an exacto knife?

Below are daily updated images of the past couple of weeks.

Day 45 of 100: A truly terrible yet worth it mistake. It should be Day 46 but I missed a day. Oh well. Previous to todayI had done some work sketching out an Audubon background, from his Bachman’s Warbler, to see if I could use watercolor befo
Day 44 of 100: 5 minute shadow experiment. I am obsessed with shadow puppets. At some point I want to make some real shadow puppets, as that counts as cutouts! This was a five minute freehand experiment, turns out I can churn out a boring landscape
Day 43 of 100, part II: Close-ups of Audubon, Your Loves Have Flown. Great Auk: The last pair were nesting mates, killed to sell as specimens to a collector in 1844. Labrador Duck: The last of these was shot, killed and eaten in 1878. Passenger P
Day 42 of 100: Two quick flowers. I have something much more involved that I’m still piecing together and will hopefully be done tomorrow, but I promised myself I’d post cutouts every day—in part that is to make myself rush and make
Day 40 of 100: This year's snail mail project These are postcards for this year's snail project, though I promise I did cut things out today. Last year I did a year-long physical mailing project where people received a print of what I had experiment
Day 39 of 100: A few things I’ve thrown away. I have been thinking a lot about garbage recently, and planned obsolescence. Our stove of only 5 years just died. Because appliances, even huge ones, aren’t built to last longer than that. T
Day 38 of 100: The collection is growing. I like that you don’t know what this is building to at all. After this I’m doing something larger. I’m tired of these itty bitty things. Some people love working in miniature, and while I
Day 37 of 100: Three chairs whose purpose is forthcoming That’s all I can say. I have a plan for these little chairs. Besides, cutting things out on weekends feels weird. I may need to revisit that constraint. . . . . . . . . . . #paperart #pa
Day 36 of 100: Bad Thonet Chair. I wanted to experiment at freehand cutting a silhouette of a Thonet chair from memory, without sketching first. Answer, not great. There’s nothing wrong with this little wonky chair, it’s kind of cute if
Day 35 of 100 part II—Audubon without Audubon in color. I decided to make this a separate post, because it turned out so pretty and so stupid. On this cutout I did something I knew would fail, which was watercolor the cutout AFTER it was cut in
Day 35 of 100—Audubon without Audubon. This silhouette is taken from John James Audubon’s print of the Autumnal Warbler—minus the warblers. Audubon’s prints are gorgeous with a capital G. But he also killed a hell of a lot of
Day 34 of 100—Invisible City: Mourning Dove and Sparrow. One of my conditions was really acting up today. I only had about an hour and a half of active time in me. Happily I had already sketched out these birds to be a part of the Invisible Cit
Day 34 of 100: Wolf Thing. I used liquid watercolor on paper over the weekend, just to see what I could make out of it and what I could cut out of it. So far it doesn’t look so great. But I’m trying out lots of things. I also don’t
Day 33 of 100—Some Things Go and Some Things Return. When I showed someone my sketch of the flooded trailer home he winced. He said, “Isn’t that using a poor person’s pain for artistic purposes? Like disaster porn? That is som
Day 32 of 100—New York Aster. This past weekend was neurologically twisty-turny so this was all I managed Sunday, and I cut it out too late to photograph it. I do like the feel of what I’m cutting out freehand. Almost all the other ones w
Day 31 of 100: Dying Coneflower (Echinacea). This is all I could do today. This is the season where our lovely coneflower looks like it’s rotting on the stem. The petals look like they’re dripping tar. But then they become this wonderful
Day 30 of 100—Bee Balm. Messy tousled mop-topped bee balm. It is a wonderful pollinator plant and I simply can’t stand the way it looks. Which forced me last spring to examine my designer’s desires and go, “Ugh, fine” an
Day 30 of 100—A Love Note to Jane Goodall. To undiluted goodness, compassion and gentle ferocity, to brilliance and wisdom and oak-like tenacity, to Jane Goodall who expanded the human tribe. I had planned a completely different cutout for tod
Next

Invisible City