I started by making a photolithograph from tusche and spray paint on acetate. I cut this print into circles and progressed from a singular piece to 5 independent collages, working to not have waste pieces by the end of the process. This principle shaped the rest of my process where I kept and used all of my materials until they had no other stage to go. Proceeding in a circular manner, I used the traces left by one iteration to produce the next. After scanning these collages and creating letterpress prints from these scans, I returned to the original acetate and collaged it into a new photolithograph with the letterpress prints pasted on top.
Then, I cut all of that paper into strips for weaving and part of those became imagery for a small artist book commemorating my 20th birthday. Using all but one of the original prints I still had, I made 40 small weavings and created many leftover rectangles in this process. Now using all of this material: original prints, the first collages, letterpress prints, weavings, misprints from the artist book: I found ways to reconfigure them into 24 new shapes and used every piece that I previously created.
How is creating with the intent to cut up, rip, glue over and obscure, different from other artistic practices? A drawing can reduce an image into discrete shapes– flattening the world to accommodate a 2D surface. Drawing and collage start to differ when the collage facilitates interaction between different fragments which each have their own agency.
Collage as a verb describes the way my body moves when realizing I have the ability to cannibalize my own work. Each stack of paper records some element of my life and how I organize my thoughts in a specific moment. They result from a series of decisions a version of me made in the past. Those decisions about how and what to make, reverberate months later, limiting what I can make from one point to the next. Limiting as in creating boundaries, defining a set of possibilities. If the stack of paper is to be the final resting place, I try to give the stack a second notice. Are these pieces truly finished or could these individual parts come together in new shapes? The absence of a recognizable image acts as a chrysalis for the collage to emerge and echo with fragments of the original piece.
What I find so beautiful about art is that someone would want to make it and would want to share it with others. By sharing, the particular details of one life touch the particular details of another life and hopefully, generate a third stage of being together. With this project, I want to communicate something about the way I think and the way I make sense of the world in front of me. Perhaps in the next stage, the audience can map their own ideas onto my work and find meaning alongside me.
Please take your turn in making sense.
Notes on Iterating video - documentation in progress
Image of second litho - documentation in progress
22 collages - documentation in progress