I suddenly realise today that I’ve not really written here about my text collage work. It is all over my instagram account though, (elenathomas13) and last weekend I did a small workshop in my studio, and will do another at the end of the month. Here’s the eventbrite link if you want to join in… I only have room for 5 people though, so if it suddenly gets popular you might miss it!
I don’t think I have spoken about it, because I don’t see it as “Important” really. It’s a thing I do as a meditation or a warm-up. It serves as an intermediate activity between home and studio. I mostly do it at home these days, but occasionally it strays. I don’t invest much time in it, and I certainly don’t invest any money much – one tube of pritt stick goes a long way.
So here is what I do: I tear pages out of Sunday supplement magazines. Usually a page from each long article to start with, and always Caitlin Moran because she has a great vocabulary and a turn of phrase that suits a fellow midlander. I slice it into columns, getting rid of headlines, call-outs and photos. Then I chop each column into three and mix them up. The idea is to lose contact with the original context. I then choose a few at random to slice into lines of text. Up to this point I am not reading, just cutting. When I have a heap of lines, then I start reading. What I’m looking for are groups of words and phrases that can be used in a new context, and throw off the old, so their original context cannot be gleaned any more.
Then I lay them out, still jumbled on a piece of cloth. Still not trying to make sense, I start putting phrases and words together to make a new sort of sense… at that stage I might have four groups of pairings or threes on my mat… then at some point, as I add more words, now chopping as I go, new meanings start to appear. It is only at this point that I start to feel the need for individual words to connect what I have… I might spend ten minutes looking through the cuttings for “because” or “actually” or “bigger”… or a couple of days ago I must have spent about half an hour looking for “concentration” to complete a phrase!
It is the process of this that holds my attention, in addition to the poignant or funny or political statement I might end up with.
The activity of removing from a recognised coherent source, destroying that coherence and constructing something new fascinates me.
I find that random really the wrong word here. I choose the pages fairly casually from a known and chosen source. But it isn’t random, but rather without a discernible pattern. The way I chop things up follows rules. The way I then choose the words and phrases is more aligned to whatever I am thinking about. That might tie in with my visual work, or a social or political theme… what I end up with is undeniably mine.
What I really like is the exercise it gives my brain. Sometimes in order to say what I want, I have to adjust the grammar to the available verbs and pronouns. Sometimes I have to find alternatives… instead of the impossible to find word “carefully” I might have to say “with a slow hand” or “his actions showed love”. This has a really interesting affect on my lyric writing. There’s more than one way to say I love you. More than one way to say the sky is blue.
So… having written about this activity I do in such an off-hand manner, maybe I should look at it again? Perhaps I should assign it more importance… or at least relevance… within my wider practice?
