Collage: Time Hung Motionless / The mess of art-making / Staying sane during lockdown

RTomens, 2020

Limits, self-imposed or otherwise, can be advantageous in the creative process. I should know, never having had a studio - what a luxury that would be. Instead, here in The Cave, we must make do as best we can when it comes to art-making and storage space. We even built an open compartment in the hall with boards resting on door frames to create space for a few of LJ's paintings just below the ceiling. Well, she will insist on putting paint to canvas in the Fine Art tradition!

Meanwhile, I work on paper. Paper's great. It's thin, for starters. I can have fifty work in a pile that stands just a few centimetres tall. So there. But the other day I felt like making a paper collage, not having done so for some time - the mess! It reminded me of how messy the process is....scraps of paper, screwed up, folded, shoved in the bin, lying around where, months later, they'll be uncovered - "Ah, there's that little head I was going to use...and that scrap of text cut from a book" etc. Then there's the paste, which I leave on my brush so that it solidifies the bristles, which have to be run under hot water in an effort to separate them again when I want to use it. 

Still, I made Time Hung Motionless, which I'm fairly pleased with. Trouble is, I felt rusty...out of touch with what it takes to create images from paper. I got frustrated, but pressed on. It's obviously no masterpiece of collage but then, like happiness, who said success was ever guaranteed?

Because I can't help working in a ragged fashion unless the medium itself is inherently neat, I tend towards being wayward when applying paint, for instance. I don't consider myself a control freak but elements I can't seem to control drive me mad. It takes all my concentration to stick a piece of paper where I think it should go.

Despite loving the mechanical nature of, say, the typewriter, I also love how mistakes can easily happen. But the good thing about Concrete Poetry/Vispo is that mistakes must, by their very nature, be small, therefore not impacting hugely on the finished piece. Unless, that is, you're making a precise, geometric shape, in which case one letter overrun can be maddening.

Unintentionally, Time Hung Motionless is an apt title for life during the second lockdown. The days drift by, one barely distinguishable from the next. As I said to LJ on the first day, "It feels like a Bank Holiday". In these circumstance, the fact that both us us make art is more important than ever. It just about keeps me sane anyway. For as long as I'm concentrating on that, I'm not thinking about how insane the world has become.