O hopeful Yearmaker
2023

Artwork and Design: Philip Leonard Ocampo
Writing: Alana Traficante
Price: $35.00
Date: 2023
34 full-colour pages, coil bound
8.5 x 11”

Publisher: Art Metropole
ISBN: 978-1-989010-26-6

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O hopeful Yearmaker is a 2024 calendar and artist book, debuting 12 new paintings by Philip Leonard Ocampo and accompanying writing by Alana Traficante.

Painted and written alongside the unfurling of 2023, O hopeful Yearmaker asks Traficante and Ocampo to draw upon synaesthetic, introspective interpretations of a year. To share experiences with each other as reflection and foretelling of months both bygone and forthcoming maps a dialogue informed by a growing friendship.

An electric consciousness reverberates across these works as though no singular, time-based vessel, such as a month, could contain them. In their seriality, time unfolds in its durational sense—as it is lived, felt and acted.

Through intuition and symbology in words and images, the project contemplates parallel experiences of the year and asks: if life is so chaotic, electric and precious, how could colonial time ever fathom the soul of it?