All of us are stuck at home (or should be) and speaking personally I am having a hard time concentrating right now. But with all this time on my hands I have been beating myself up for not using it to make more art, more paintings and glass. But alas I am just not in an energetic mood, feeling a little discombobulated having lost my routine, so I forgo the painting studio to take up residence in my printing area, where I have drawers and drawers of bits of failed prints waiting for a new life. I have wanted for years to make something with them, but lacked the time or the incentive to do so. So now I have lots of time, and the incentive is a short attention span and needing to interact physically with the work.
So out came the scissors and glue stick. I opened the drawers and just started cutting. What initially emerged were scattered bits of paper that I then stitched on. I felt like the pieces of my life were falling apart and I needed to pull them back together. What emerged initially were images that looked like this.
So i returned day after day to my collage table which got more and more covered with random pieces of paper.
The collages took me on a journey of daily discovering my inner emotions, those things I couldn’t express verbally but wanted to explore nevertheless. I outwardly felt fine, but these are strange times we are living in and the feelings became more and more apparent as I worked.
So then the stitching stopped , and the parts started stacking, but precariously. Shapes balanced on shapes but barely hanging on.
The collages are all different sizes since I scoured my paper drawers for whatever paper I had that I could put the collages on. I have drawers and drawers of printmaking and drawing papers that I have had for years. Most I have no idea where they came from or even what they are. This felt like a really good opportunity to use some of this paper I had been saving. For what? I guess for this!
So as I worked I noticed the parts sometimes getting closer. After weeks of being in the house with my spouse and roommate I started wondering if this was a reaction to the closeness of our situation or a desire to get my larger world glued back together, my friends and my art life out there somewhere i want to pull back in. Maybe it was a little of both.
So I will continue making these monoprint collages (I call them quarantine collages) until I stop. For now I have not run out of the interest in seeing where the shapes go next. How are you spending your quarantine hours?