Collage: A form of art in which various materials such as photographs and pieces of paper or fabric are arranged and stuck to a backing; a combination or collection of various things…
Pieces of things, like scraps, are dominating my awareness recently. They seem a bit disjointed and yet I know that they are woven into my days, in a pattern that begins to emerge as I learn to hold the seeming-disparity of them. I note that recently I have seen in wanderings outside: a stack of pumpkins; wildflowers in the grass on a sunny fall day; a rumblingly loud downpour two mornings ago; a barren tree with only a few red leaves left clinging; the full moon skirting the edge of the yard’s Douglas fir; trees still in summer’s fresh green adornments; a fallen leaf like a painting, bearing a palette of liquid, wet fire. My writing has been the same way recently; I have found single cohesive paragraphs in writing files on my computer, scrawled handwriting in my journal that catches my eye then my heart, ideas for other writing projects scribbled onto the backs of torn up old writing revisions. Even my creative life has offered bits. But an unfinished masks project ‘conspired’ with a recent papermaking endeavor to help me understand the way in which these pieces come together to make larger meanings.
Several years ago I started a masks project. I got as far as making the Plaster of Paris molds of my face. Then I carefully stowed them in a plastic bin which has sat on a top shelf in my cottage gathering dust, forgotten. More recently, I had the urge to make hand crafted paper, a beloved craft I had not nurtured in many years. I was ecstatic to end up with four sheets of thick, nubbly off-white paper with small flecks of various colors, a random number or word, and ragged edges. I set this paper on display on my coffee table for a while, and then in an “in-progress” corner of my study. The sheets remained untouched until last week when I remembered the masks project. And an idea popped into my head: Use homemade paper to begin collaging one of the masks. I had no vision of a finished product, no agenda or timeline or a next step. All I knew is that I had to begin affixing small scraps of the hand made paper onto one of the plaster surfaces. I chose a mask, somewhat randomly, from the bin. And the process began.
The reality of a creative project that entails collaging pieces of paper onto a surface so that something emerges is now translating to my writing, and to my experience of the seemingly unrelated nature scenes that are coming together in my daily experiences. I tear a bit of paper from the transformed sheet of once-bank-statements, and carefully apply adhesive so that the mask’s surface becomes covered. I read four or five short, unfinished essays and find a common theme woven through them; I compile them into a single document and begin sewing them together with additional text. I remember that the sunburst, a full moon, a twiggy leafless maple, the on-fire leaf covered branches of another maple, that baby slug on my carpet, a pumpkin sale, those wildflowers, the windblown bamboo chimes, and a torrential rainstorm have occurred all within the space of several days in a transition season.
What began as separate crafts projects emerged as a unified work of art. What occurred as incongruent-seeming bits of landscape or weather patterns became the everchanging process of autumn on a Pacific Northwest island. What started as sentences of typewritten prose or handwritten journal entries became a series of cohesive essays and book chapters. This is the “combination of various things” that, at first, seems so random and unstructured. They are the very same pieces that are now coming together in wholeness in my life as I move fluidly between full immersion in the singular moments and the larger perspective of my inner and outer landscapes.
All blog photographs taken by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
