My favourite collage artist is Eunice Parsons. She turned 107 this year. At the end of this post is a fascinating video of her aged 90 in her studio. If I make it to 90, I want to be in my studio still making collage too. Eunice said that “collage, like life, is an art of imperfection, of the torn edge and the spot of glue.”
My version of that: Life, like collage, is the art of embracing imperfection and torn edges, collecting and collating fragments and sticking them together until the time comes to tear them up and rearrange them all over again.
What I love about collage is the visceral experience of ripping up, arranging and sticking down. The act of ripping, tearing, cutting, arranging, glueing, deconstructing and reconstructing is tremendously therapeutic and soothing for both mind and soul. Sometimes I use the torn pieces to express something, and sometimes I find a route into my unconscious from how the scraps arrange themselves.
Sometimes I will arrange and rearrange and keep on rearranging before pasting anything down. Sometimes I just keep tearing and sticking until I get an impulse to stop, with no specific thought to what I’m composing. Having said that I do have an impulse to create balance in a collage (and maybe in life), so no matter how mind-less I am when doing it, I still have to have that final tweak if the balance isn’t quite there for me.
I love that you can utilise materials that are readily available, such as magazines, junk mail, envelopes, packaging, scraps of paper that you doodled on, bits and pieces from nature and found objects. Pretty much anything can be collage materials. Other than that you just need scissors and glue. You can even use old papers or books to collage onto. It’s the ultimate in recycling and it’s also a way of observing what you are consuming.
I’ve made a video to bring you along with me as I create a collage based around the idea of death and rebirth. The deconstruction (tearing apart) of the papers represents “death” of the old. The reconfiguration represents a “rebirth” of something new.
I have used coffee filter papers left over from making inks and paint, papers painted with my homemade paint, bits of old roadmaps, scraps of wrapping paper and words foraged from wherever. For me, there is an added dimension in using filter papers that have been part of my paint-making process as these have already participated in a journey of transformation from plant to dye to paint.
I hope you enjoy seeing a little of my process. There’s a second short video of a flick through one of my collage sketchbooks if you fancy that too.
I invite you to also have a play with collage this week. You may like to try your own representation of death and rebirth or just play with scraps of paper and images ripped from magazines or junk mail. Let your soul decide what to choose. Don’t edit or judge or question, just pick and tear, then glue. Have no intentions other than to play and see what lights you up.
Next week I’ll share more of my take-aways from the books Hagitude and Wise Power, then there will be one more short post for the Winter Solstice before I go into a period of rest and energy gathering for the year ahead.
Until next week - have fun ripping and sticking and do leave a comment on what insights you got from the process. Here’s the wonderfully inspirational Eunice…