Accidental collage
The studio table has to be a mess. A real mess. There are accidents, waiting to happen.
I was sat here for days this week, moving things around, too consciously. Trying to ‘make’ mages. It was torturous, ineffectual, there was no spark. Nothing worked.
Now, a day I decide to have a sort out, I tip all the pieces of paper I’ve collected and cut out from the boxes I keep them in, and onto the table. Found images from magazines and books, cut out bodies and parts of bodies from photocopies of family photographs, fragments of text and drawings. At first, it’s chaos. I can’t find anything. I feel a rising frustration. Have I totally lost my mojo?
But then, I take a seat, and I start to really look.
A woman, walking away, into the faces of some school children in a torn school photograph, next to a photocopied fragment of a house. A cut out hand from a magazine on a rephotograph of a child’s folded hands.
Me and uncle Gerry standing in a book illustration of a rural landscape. An archway, a window, weirdly skewered against a tree
The table stops being hopeless chaos, and becomes charged, animated. There is no fixing, or sticking, – these pieces of things must be free to wander, be found, meet others. Meaning will be made. Then re-made when the boxes are tipped out again.The process, not a final image, is what’s important.
I am not ‘doing’. I just try to create conditions for the accidental collisons. i.e. make a mess. That’s easy!
I will just try to ‘see’ what’s there. All I do is document what happens this time around. And be ready for the next.
