Collage Fragments Deconstructed

At first glance, this collage might seem like it's about as much fun to view as it is to trek a pilgrimage through desert sands. Barefoot. On one's knees.



"The Memory of Coffin Spelled Backward," paper collage
with décollage, Laura Tringali Holmes 2013

Yes, there is the anxious-looking child, supporting her chin with her hand, as swaths of thought patterns rendered in language symbols cut through her head. Not to mention the maps of places unvisited serving as background.

Like I said, burning desert sands.

Detail, "The Memory of Coffin Spelled Backward." The wafting misty mirror writing
 is achieved through gel transfer, in this case from paper taken from the Speedwriting
Shorthand Dictionary (1923). When you want a wafting look, there's nothing better,
in my humble opinion, than gel transfer combined with décollage. All the words
here begin with the letter C, and, yes, the word "coffin" is in there somewhere. 

And then there is that guy. Let's call him the father figure. What is he lifting? Could it be a child-sized coffin? Is the girl's integrity as a human being and her value inside? Is that why she looks so anxious? Is the guy about to come at her with a big fat belt?  Is that why all that language/thought stuff is afloat?

Like I said, barefoot and on your knees.

Detail, "The Memory of Coffin Spelled Backward." And, no,
it's not a coffin, just a tabletop being muscled onto its legs, from
a volume in the voluminous 1960s Practical Handyman encyclopedia.

But wait. There's more. C'mon down, Emily Dickinson, and bring your wonderfully poetic lines: "Hope is the thing with feathers...that perches in the soul." I invite you, dear readers, to note the direction of our girl's eyes.

Why...it would seem she's locked onto The Thing With Feathers! Not her father, or whatever it is he happens to be holding.

Detail, "The Memory of Coffin Spelled Backward." Okay, so the gaze isn't
perfectly aligned, but we collage artists do what we can with what we have.
And if you've been following this blog, you know that this girl has had her hopeful
work cut out for her, so we're going to give her a round of applause anyway.

And, for an even more potent portent, we have what I am, for the purposes of this blog entry, calling a "flourishing target." Do you know about my Target Practice Project? No? I won't trouble you with a nosebleed about the Project right now, but I do encourage you to learn about it and to enjoy the work of some 150 artists, who have generated over 300 images based on a single 1960s Sears Roebuck archery target, at these links:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/161991817319872/
http://thetargetpracticeproject.blogspot.com/

I have used a fragment of that same target here, but in this case, drilling down right here and right now, we can see that the plain paper target has taken on, through the magic of collage and the ink that lives on paper, evidence of fecundity. Wow. The plot gets thickerer and thickerer.

Detail, "The Memory of Coffin Spelled Backward." This shows the target, to which
I have added, through ink transfer from an old magazine page, tree trunks and
flourishing foliage. Hope is the thing with feathers, but hope is in nature, too.

So let's look at the collage again, shall we? And let's cast a weather eye toward the hope that is embedded, albeit subtly, because we survivors of narcissistic parents have certainly had plenty of opportunity to hone our survival chops (albeit subtly).

The point of all this being that once we can look at our memories, and realize that they ARE memories and not predictors of our futures...well...

...we are then on our way, aren't we?

Thank you, again, for listening. I am thankful, on this Thanksgiving weekend, that you are out there listening.



Don't Get Jittery On Me--Part 10, or "Natures Mortes"

And this is the end of my most recent altered book. Thank you for enduring the previous nine entries. Rest assured that after this post, I will no longer trouble you on this topic.

But there is something you need to know. Something that I know.

You might not see it at first, but if you look closely enough at anything living, even while it's in that blissful state of seeming perfection, there's usually evidence of something booking quick to that line between ripe and rotten--natures mortes.

This used to bother me. In fact, for the longest time, while otherwise enjoying the seminal Dutch still life paintings in particular, I'd avert my eyes at the blemish on the otherwise perfect pear skin, the wilting petal summarily dropped to the table from the otherwise fulsome peony.

But if you live long enough, your perspective has to change. Stasis is a joke. I turned 61 a few days ago. That's sixty-one. That casts a bit of a different shade on the fine line between ripe and rotten and the appreciation thereof. 

And so, while enjoying the last of Don't Get Jittery On Me, you might get the feeling that happy endings exist within a continuum larger than black and white. That's as it should be. Life is so much more complex, and so much more beautiful, than that, and we as a society really do need to talk about that.

But back to the book:

We left our heroine here at last reading, contemplating empty lawn chairs,
contemplating repose.



We turn the page...and encounter a concealed trifold. You'll see this open in the next photo.
If you've been following the evolution of this altered book, you might remember the image on the
right. Yup, she's now officially a motif. Here she dispenses advice in the same way she did in the
initial pages. "Stay a while. Complete the thought?" she asks the reader. The bookmark, an
altered playing card, presents an alternate view.

The trifold. Transparencies abound, but what is life but seeking transparency?
The text snips are really important here. I appreciate images. I appreciate words.
Most of all, I appreciate words riding shotgun with images.
 

A detail. There are symbolic references galore here to my life.
I won't bore you with that. But I will show you the lift-up flap...
 

After lifting, this is what you see. I love the exclamation point.
That snip comes from the liner notes of some pretty old vinyl.
 

"She kept herself company." Another detail of the trifold. A seemingly innocent statement,
note that there is an image, and then the same image, reversed, atop, which creates
a grouping of four from a photo of two. I'm not implying the need for multiple
personalities, simply that sometimes resiliency--and self-reliance--carry the day.
 

The next spread features birds (no surprise there) and, gasp, an Older Woman.
A viewfinder circle points out the bird brooch at the woman's throat. There's
a pink pig with wings. There's text. There are holes punched along a bifold
(on the right) Someday I'll thread them with ribbon or whatever. For now I'm
liking the negative space. (For the bird-impaired, at right you're looking at
a red-bellied woodpecker and a rufous hummingbird.)

A detail. I must say, I love that she's wearing a bird brooch. This page is composed of a photo,
collaged  papers, acetate transparencies, and a bit of metal to hold all the layers together.
I'm never complacent about the number of  repurposed things that can come together under
 my hands.

 

Geez, this is complicated. Apologies. The bifold on the right opens, and this
is what you see. Note the shadow bird on the left side of the bifold (a hawk), and
how it transforms into a dove on the right side of the bifold. There are lots
of men birds in the center, looking in all sorts of directions. Remember, this book
has as its theme recovery from being raised in a family with a narcissistic parent.
 

Turning the page, there's our heroine. And she's dancing! I devised a way to
get her to lift off the page at certain points to increase the feeling of motion.
On the right is a catchall pocket thing, with an altered playing card thanking...
people...with a vintage text strip. One of the things I like about recycling old
words is that...sometimes...it's easier than pulling them up from the heart.
 

Which brings us back to a snapshot of the opening spread. If there's one thing I have learned,
it's the beauty of circularity. This page shows the dedication. This book is for one of my three
children, Emma. Other projects have been and are dedicated to my other two children, Pete and Eva.
My children are individuals and I revel in their individuality.

Whew. And that is it for Don't Get Jittery On Me, an altered book, a labor of love created with painstaking detail and quite a few emotional twists and turns over more months than I can count. I leave you, dear reader, with some sadness, as is to be expected with any project that is finally finished. And for those of you who have ploughed through this with not much idea of what I'm talking about, I urge you to dig around in the blog archives for the earlier posts, which will reveal the themes and, if you are so inclined, the how-tos. 

Whatever will I write about now? Stay tuned.

And thanks, as always, for listening.

If you've enjoyed this series, you might want to have a peek at The Target Practice Project, an international collage collaboration that I began in order to use up the piles of 1960s Sears archery targets I discovered while cleaning up my father's garage after his death. I blog about it here http://lauratringaliholmes.blogspot.com/2013_08_01_archive.html and here http://lauratringaliholmes.blogspot.com/2014/09/one-year-later-empty-chair.html

You can get a much better sense of the scope of the Project--and marvel at the work contributed by a huge group of talented collage artists-- by popping over to the Tumbler, at http://thetargetpracticeproject.tumblr.com

Don't Get Jittery On Me--Part 9, or "This Deed Is Almost Done"

When last we left off in the construction of this altered book, we were inventing a future. Reinvention is such a hot topic these days. People molt identities like snakeskins and then write books and magazine articles about how you can and should do it, too. Oh, were it that easy!

But it is not. Our childhood patterns are insidious, the big green goo of them sliming into any unoccupied corner of our brains, not to mention our hearts. Think ectoplasm. Think Ghostbusters.

And then think challenges. And how our pasts do not have to be predictors of our futures...if we have the resolve and, more important, as a first step, if we are able to say to ourselves and anybody else who will listen " I don't want to be like that." In breaking the cycle, there can be the salvation. Take it from me or, better yet, find it out for yourself.

And here is the penultimate segment in how the long story of "Don't Get Jittery On Me," my altered book, my sort-of-autobiography, unfolds...as usual, presented in pictures. Augmented, as you have come to expect from me by now, with lengthy captions.

I hope to wrap this series up in 10 entries, this being the 9th. If, dear reader, you are completely lost, the previous blog entry is in the October archive list.

For a quick memory refreshment, we left off here:

Birdproofing mesh on the left reveals, when opened, a trio of raucous crows, a
talking stick, a leaping little girl, and some upstretched arms
indicating that all may (potentially) not be lost.

The next spread shows us people fleeing the abyss on the left under the
watchful eye of One Big Bird. Of course there is clarifying text. 
At right, under the purple netting, are additional plot details, including my favorite
line ever: "Had my hair not been so firmly painted on my head, it would
have stood on end." The girl in the porthole is from an old Look magazine.

PURPLE NETTING? May I interject my feelings about using "mixed media" with traditional collage here?  No? I can feel the purists' shudders.... Okay, a topic for another time....

When you flip the page you get more explanatory text and yet another porthole.
Now our girl's head is atop a bird. I suppose that's an editorial comment. At
left you see a card from a Boy Scout playing deck and a game spinner. The
broken key at the bottom of the bird at right is actually a handle.

When you lift it, you've got a score! The book from which this illustration
was taken couldn't be farther from the sporting world. But who could resist
the triumph in the posture? Things are starting to look up around here.

I think we may just have stumbled upon a turning point.

A long time ago, I wrote a blog about incorporating the garish foil
vintage greeting card, which appears on the right of this spread, in my
altered book. It turned out to be a pretty seamless entry, and provided a
springboard for editorial ruminations. Note the closed porthole
 with suggestions of "ok" and, "how."  I like
incorporating hints rather than clobbering people over their heads.

The thing to notice here is how, when you flip the page (and the garish greeting
card) onto the next spread, the stems of the glasses just appear. Collage is magic.
I can say no more. At right, I sistered in a page from the original book, which I had
removed initially as part of the book prep process, because it provides editorial
 continuity and because, although I don't really believe in such things,
I kind of like being a Scorpio.

And then, on the next spread, we have the lawn chairs. A foreshadowing of
repose? Our heroine is at least on the same page with those chairs. It's
been a long time coming, but she'll get to repose, I know.

 

 

Until next time. Thanks so much for listening.

The last in the series, Part 10, finally, whew, may be found here: http://lauratringaliholmes.blogspot.com/2013/11/dont-get-jittery-on-me-part-10-or.html