Each day since January 1, 2010, artist Lisa Congdon has posted a photograph or drawing of a real or imagined collection. Many feature everyday objects of the home: coasters, brushes, hairpins, spatulas—which she artfully arranges and posts on A Collection a Day, 2010. The May issue of Martha Stewart Living, coming soon to a newsstand near you, highlights Lisa's project in their "Great Finds" feature, noting "Collections have been documented for centuries—but never like this." Lisa makes the old new again, digitally photographing objects from long ago and far away for you to enjoy from the comfort of your office chair.

Lisa Congdon's A Collection A Day on pg 42 of Martha Stewart Living

As I wrote in January in A Collection of Artists as Collectors,

The art of collecting seems an almost intuitive human trait. Whether gathering seashells at the beach, amassing stationery for sending on some future day, acquiring postcards in every city you've ever visited, collecting art (cough cough), or storing an object simply because it's beautiful, the collection re-contextualizes both extraordinary and mundane objects that have been amassed by some trait of sameness.

Lisa's objects go beyond the simple act of amassing, extending the idea of the collecting to a museum-like form of neat and deliberate display. Through her presentation, she offers vignettes of her relationship to the objects, and suggests a curiosity-cabinet-like living environment that I imagine is full of drawers and boxes and cases waiting to be re-discovered.

Vintage orange plastic spoons and spatulas. from Day 82 of Lisa's project

Not merely a gleaner of the gorgeous, Lisa also puts pen to paper to create her own collections—the illustrated ones that are part of her project, and the portfolios of works from which her three 20x200 editions, Lovebirds, Owl No. 1 and Birch Forest No. 7 originate.

Owl No. 1 by Lisa Congdon