Collage part 2

I decided to try using red ink as a background possibly or to draw on the text pieces. This turned out to be too cheesy. A bad idea. The simplicity of the pieces and the text was enough and my text written in ink was too literal. These were some of the words I had eaten in the performance. The quietness and subtlety of eating harsh words in the performance works far better than them spelled out in red ink. Too literal and vulgar. Not that I mind vulgar in general but not for this. There is subtlety, haphazardness and complexity that I’m very pleased with. I am always afraid of text in art as I never know whether it actually works. My fear of text is I suppose apt for me to work with as my work deals with fear, my own fears in general. This is quite a scary project for me. I’m happy with the work being made in a haphazard way as I get very nervous about choosing words. I’m terrified of poetry, not reading it but writing it. I think I would drive myself insane if I went at it too much. I prefer the breathing space I’m allowed with visual work as every day it’s something new. It’s not so concrete as the symbol of the word. I’m very free in what I say verbally, but I’m too anxious about writing things down, although I am writing this. I’m not so scared of prose, I have been writing some biographical stuff recently that I have very much enjoyed and been more frank than I ever have before. There are definitely uses for writing for me. I’ve realised I can talk about the wider things, the surface things but the deeper, finer and less graspable/tangible emotional things I need visual work to express. Some people can attain this through words, like poets. My visual work is my poetry I suppose. I would like it to be. I realised reading Heart of Darkness recently how deeply moving and visceral words can be. I forget sometimes, although that probably sounds ridiculous to a lot of people. It’s just like a long poem. Some of it has deeply anti racist sentiment for the time, but due to the time, the descriptive stuff is racist.

Collage for The Other Room Anthology.

I have been asked by The Other Room, the event I performed my eating words performance last December, to submit something for their third yearly anthology. I decided to do some collage work with the left over fragments of pages that were torn out in the eating process. This is something I had planned to do for ages… I really need deadlines! I tried a few ideas and approaches, some with illustrations, some simple, some more complex.

I decided that the more simple but well constructed ones worked best. The illustrations were good but possibly not as striking. These were hung as prints for a few days in my studio and I thank Helen Shanahan, part of my studio group and fellow Womb member, for helping me to decide what initially worked best.