Join Phidon Pens & other community leaders on Thursday, January 23rd for the 100 Notebook Project Exhibition at Tapestry Hall.

This is an event that invites you to explore the creative thinking of students, artists, designers, and many other professionals found across the Creative Capital of Canada.

Being a creative is part of the human condition - it resides in all of us. With time, patience, and a blank piece of paper, this skillset can be practiced. The 100 Notebook Project allows you to step into the thoughts of hundreds of contributors.

ABOUT THE 100 NOTEBOOK PROJECT
Hemingway, da Vinci, and Currie are just a few among many who recorded their thoughts, their work and their day-to-day musings in notebooks which now provide us with insight into their creative minds. Inspired by the legacy of these powerful thinkers and the notebooks they left behind, the 100 Notebook Project aims to engage the broader public in the age old tradition of notebook keeping while recognizing that we are all authors and artists - of our own thoughts and lives.

Every run of the project tasks a select community of 100 participants to each fill a notebook with their day-to-day experiences, recording their reflections through a combination of art and writing. Upon the completion of each session, the notebooks are collected and put on display in a collective exhibition open to the public. Through this exhibition, visitors are offered the opportunity to explore the minds of the participants as captured within the notebooks. and celebrate the unique perspectives offered by each individual.

Following the closing of the exhibition, every notebook is added to an ongoing and growing archive of notebooks. The cumulative goal of this collection is to create a circulating library of notebooks that can be viewed further afield so that the voices of the participants and the power of the notebook can be shared with as wide an audience as possible.

THE FIRST 500
The 100 Notebook Project was initiated in 2015 as a collaboration between Phidon Pens and BRIDGE Centre for Architecture + Design, a student-led organization at the University of Waterloo's School of Architecture. Participants included not only students from the school, but also creatives from the larger Cambridge community. It showcased the wealth of creative energy within the community and demonstrated how powerful the notebook was as medium for capturing that output.

The project took a hiatus in subsequent years, but re-emerged in 2019 with a remarkable 4 runs: first in Sudbury with Laurentian University's McEwan School of Architecture, then in Kitchener with Path The Dog Theatre Creation before returning to Cambridge as a partnership with the students at Preston High School, and finally, in Waterloo with Communitech. Each run highlighted a different creative demographic and how they use the notebook as a tool for thinking and recording.

The culmination of these first 5 initial runs is a large-scale exhibition at Tapestry Hall in Cambridge's newly redeveloped Gaslight District, which will bring together selected highlights from each run so far. While our participants (along with their close family & friends) may have already experienced the wonder of filling and viewing a personal notebook, few within the broader community have yet to grasp how powerful a moment it can be when a notebook opened and its contents absorbed.

We feel that the 100 Notebook Project is not only an exercise to perpetuate and extend the tradition of notebook keeping in our modern world, but also offers a platform for participants' voices to be heard, and a chance for others to appreciate the unique and varied perspectives within our communities. Creativity exists in all of us and manifests itself in different ways. We believe that these collected notebooks communicate the wonderful talent and energy that lie in our community.

EVENT SCHEDULE
7:30pm - 8:00pm | Opening Messages
8:00pm - 9:30pm | Public Exhibit
9:30pm | Closing Remarks

ADMISSION
Admission to the exhibition is free. Please register for your ticket through our Eventbrite page.