The Story Behind Stories Told
Fragments of Paper
It began with a collage. Well, 100 collages. I challenged myself to make 100 collages using only vintage magazines and a glue stick. This led me to create an online class, Inspired. The pieces also got the attention of AiR Studio Gallery, where I had previously shown my work in group shows. The gallery owner offered to show the pieces and I asked if I could have a solo show. And, to my delight, they agreed.
One hundred 8” x 7” collages isn’t enough to fill a gallery, but they inspired the twenty-four pieces on the walls in October.
Working with collage has some challenges and a major one is how to scale up your work when you are limited to using small pieces of paper. I couldn’t exactly replicate the small works in larger sizes because the proportions/scale wouldn’t all work when using small pieces. I also needed to change the materials, since magazines are tricky to work with when using a wet adhesive, like matte medium, because the colors run and bleed.
I could, however, look at a small work and notice the shapes, the use of color and text, and the composition as the starting point. Working with vintage magazines, and the small amount of color those pages have, had led me to be creative with the shapes I was creating and that was a main consideration for my larger works.
As an example, the piece below (left) is a small magazine collage. The piece on the right is a 20” x 16” work. I used the idea of the half circles as a vertical element by using a hole punch to create the collage paper on the left middle. The bit of abstracted type on the left became the striped abstracted letterpress print on the larger piece.
Sometimes I’d reference one of the magazine compositions as I worked on a larger piece but most of the time, I let my memory of those pieces access a new composition. When I was letterpress printing the papers, I reached for more colors than I usually did because I was inspired by the vibrant colors of the advertising spreads in the old magazines.
For materials, I used letterpress printed vintage book pages and some fabric book covers. I’d choose some paint colors and print for several hours, creating a unified palette. For the most part, each piece was made using only the papers from a single print session.
Not That Simple, 20” x 16” x 1/8”
With my 100 collage challenge, each piece was usually made with a single magazine page. This left me with a tray of scraps from multiple pages. Every so often, I’d create a piece using just those scraps.
For Not That Simple I used the scraps that were left on my table after finishing other works. I wanted to see if I could replicate a scrappy magazine collage as a larger work.
Fragments of Prose
My pieces all begin with a layer of blank book pages. Most of the time, I cover up any text that sneak in, but if a word interests me, I’ll leave it and work the composition around that fragment. There was a story around those words and a person who had once found them important. Leaving them is a way of respecting their work even as I was tearing into the pages.
A few months ago, I was struggling to write captions for social media posts and I decided that I’d write a story based around one of the words I’d left visible in a piece. I have a MFA in writing and spent many years as an English teacher, so writing comes easy. Creating the caption stories reminded me of standing in front of a classroom of sixth graders and creating a few sentences out of thin air to use as an example for the lesson.
I was delighted when the stories were well received and they became a regular feature.
When we were developing the concept for the show, the gallery owner suggested displaying the stories next to each piece. They will also be included in the catalog for the show.
When it came time to write the story, I’d look at the finished collage. If a word or number was part of the piece, that would spark the story. Otherwise, I’d think of the music I was listening to or a connection I had to the colors and use that as a starting point. Some of them are completely fictional, but some are loosely based on my life.
Two Tone, 20” x 16” x 1/8”
My story: “Would anyone answer if she called? Would it be Jenny?”
My inspiration: Faintly seen on the left side are some numbers- 867. This reminded me of the song “Jenny” with the lyrics of 867-5309. The song was written and performed by Tommy Tutone.
That Recent Complaint, 16 x 16 x 1.5 in
My story: "The weekly newspaper was a treasure. Take today's front page story, which began with, "There was that recent complaint that prize pigs..." Before she'd read the rest, she'd found her husband in the barn, and as he mucked out the pig pen, she'd read him the article. They certainly didn't want anyone complaining about their prize pigs."
My inspiration: I used a book page that included the sentence: “There was that recent complaint that prize pigs…” I have no idea what they were complaining about, but I could not cover up this sentence. I like to imagine someone leaning in to read this sentence and laughing (and probably puzzled as to why it’s there). Writing the story for this one was easy.
When the pieces are sold, the collector will receive a copy of the story. I hope they see other stories and connections in the piece. I plan to keep writing more of these fragments of prose for other pieces because it’s become part of my process. From story, to collage, and then back to story.