Common Ground

This piece is about how women communicate. I got the idea from a radio program, a Women-in-Business piece, that made the point that, when negotiating in the workplace, men tend to list their achievements first while women tend to try to find common ground first. With or without the workplace, I think women do attempt to find connection through a language of experience. And so this piece was born. Common Ground.

When I was putting this piece together in my head, I knew I wanted a sort of haze of words, to express communication, around the women. But I didn't want most of those words to be readable--in fact, I wanted just the opposite. I was looking to express the symbology of language, the searching for common ground, as it were.

"Common Ground," paper decollage, 8x10 on canvas board

There are probably lots of ways to achieve this, but I chose to make in-place gel transfers by embedding the text within layers of paper and then practicing the art of decollage. When I say "decollage," what I really mean is rubbing off various paper layers with water (sometimes spit) after the gel has dried. This is a good technique for the patient artist, as the papers can take a long time to dry if they're layered thickly, as these are, and it can take forever to rub down to the sections that you want to expose. Which means you have to put down the work and come up for air every now and then. It is far too easy to get into a State of Meditative Rubbing and wipe out your concept while your are singing the harmony to the songs on your playlist.

I used a bunch of interesting papers here, and the shame is that you can't see most of them. For instance, I used, as a base layer, paper from Progressive Tailor Magazine (1926), but you can see only a bit of the men's trouser pattern at top right. More visible are the pages from the Speedwriting Shorthand Dictionary (1923). These are the words, dots, and squiggles that surround the ladies. Why are the words reversed, you might ask. I would answer "remember that the ink on the page is embedded in the gel beneath it so, when you rub off the paper on top, you are left with the reverse image."

Other interesting papers used in this composition come from Ideal Fairy Tales (1897), A Field Guide to Nests, Eggs, and Nestlings of North American Birds (1978), and Irving Berlin sheet music (top left corner). Everything goes better with music, wouldn't you say?

As always, thanks for reading.