A little torn, but still going stronG

I was challenged this week, by someone on Instagram. I posted an image and a description of the meaning and this person asked me "why do you need to know what it means? Let us figure that out for ourselves." (paraphrasing).

I've thought a lot about that. It's a good question. She was responding to one of my recent collages. I shared the piece with you last week when it was in progress, but then I finished it and I fell in love.

I looked at this little collage and realised it expressed so much of what I have been trying to say for months. I had struggled to say it with paint, and I had struggled to say it with mixed media, but now here it was.

I wrote the following on Instagram:

"Something magical happened today. This little collage expresses something I’ve been trying to get at for months … maybe even years. I don’t know how it happened and I don’t yet understand exactly why it means so much … I just know it does.

I adore vintage papers and somehow here they just came together perfectly. They feel a little bit battered and bruised.

The green fabric is a little tattered. The magenta paint is bleeding a little. It all feels like my heart - a little the worse for wear after all these years, but still going strong anyway."

That's when someone asked: "why do you need to know what it means?"

As I say, good question and one that I sat down and thought about. And the answer is a categorical YES! 

See, for me art-making is not about the audience and their reactions - it's about me. It's quite a selfish act (in the best sense of that word), Making art is what I do to make sense of the world and my place in it.

For a long time, I had thought that my art was just about me and my experiences, but this collage project has brought something new and much more exciting. I see now that it's not JUST about me.

These collages are built up from layers and layers of papers. Papers made by me, papers made by my Art Tribe members, and also vintage papers. These are old book pages, or handwritten ledgers, or personal letters, some dating back to Victorian times. They are fragments of lives lived, of loves lost, and of joy and heartbreak.

I find them utterly fascinating. I spent ages yesterday looking at a page from a library book, stamped with dates ranging from 1952 to 1957. All those people, going into the library carrying their worries and cares and joys with them. And all that's left of all that is a fading stamp on a sheet of paper.

I get this same feeling in antique shops. I love to wander through aisles of objects that all speak of human lives. The board game a family played for hours during rainy holidays. The lamp that sat by a favourite chair. The dresser someone saved to buy. 

These little collages honour some of that. For sure they are about my own heartaches and joys but they also put those emotions into the context of others who felt the same.

I haven't yet found the right words to express all this, but they will come as I make more. The meaning is emerging from the art-making. And this is what I mean by "making sense of the world and my place in it." I work things out through my art. The process is revelatory and healing. AND I believe that if I do this well, my work will resonate with others. I cannot be the only person who feels a little tattered and torn :)

This project is at the early stages and I have no idea where it will lead. But I know that I need to keep following - and keep explaining what I find.

For me those explanations are quite literally the reason to keep going :)