Morning spent at the pasting table fiddling with bits of paper, which was pretty joyous. I go into some kind of trance and move things around till the placing feels right. Worked in some photographs of my mum when she was a young woman, and me when I was a kid – into the growing collage of forests, cut up illustrations, traced characters and fragments of found text.
Working with these old photograps got me thinking of essays I have been reading recently in ” Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography”- Eds Jo Spence and Patricia Holland. There is some superlative writing in there – especially an essay by Annette Kuhn.
I like this:
“The struggle over the past continues in the present. The struggle is now, the past is made in the present. Family photographs may affect to show us our past but what we do with them – how we use them – is really about today,not yesterday. These traces of our former lives are pressed into service in a never-ending process of making, remaking, making sense of, ourselves – now.”
The simple act of putting a photo of myself and my mother into a jumbled fictional collaged world which I’m making up every day feels kind of transformative. So much more to explore here. The piece also feels everyday more and more like a homage to Henry Darger, whose work I am obsessed with.
This afternoon I went into Keighley and rampaged round the charity shops with my friend Bella who like me gets near hysterical at piles of old musty books in the Watergate shop. I got 4 books for £2 – a Secret Seven story, a National Geographic, a book of Elizabeth Taylor photos and a 70’s first Aid book which a fantastic cover and fabulous illustrations. some of these are going to be butchered and added to the work – not sure how yet.
In town I got a couple of my instant books for the exhibition colour copied, which was exciting. A pretty dang good day.
