July 02nd, 2021

The desire to make more collages this week followed hot on the heels of my deep reflections last week about the action of cutting. Possibly the power of the scissors is akin to the power of the pencil? The hand cuts directly into the material - a signal sent into the hand without mediation, and capturing a feeling instantaneously.
The misty images (like the one above) transforming into more readable sharper abstract shapes.

The collage I began this time I realised had been in my thoughts for many years. When I have completed it I will post it on here , but for now I wanted to set down what is happening in the making of it. As with all the other recent collages I found an old photocopy of a photograph that satisfied my sensation of the moment.

​Today I was concerned with outside and inside, windows and light. The one I set upon was of a hotel room in southern Europe somewhere - our Grammy in shadow - deeply involved in what looked like eating breakfast in the room. The action of cutting into the upper half of the photocopy at first felt difficult, but once in there I began to imagine I was in the room with her and as the scissors worked around the table edge and window frame the sensation of 'being inside' the space was heightened...

Once satisfied with the cutting out of different elements I began rearranging them to express my own feelings about the stories we were told about her travels, and also my confusion over where these stories ended. Some of the remembered shadows of childhood emerge during this process... The collages are about memory and emotion. But the sticking of the positives and negatives becomes a healing process that allows a new image to surface.