Clio, Athene, Urania

The fourth week of collage class was “found-object” week. Now we were starting to really speak to my interests! One of the reasons I started doing this kind of thing in the first place was because I am an insufferable pack-rat and on occasion I look around and see patterns within the things I keep and try to create with them. (I was much relieved to learn that Joseph Cornell was the same way!) Found-object creations are definitely right up my alley.

There’s a little store over on Melrose near LaBrea and they are a wonderful source of all kinds of oddities and biological specimens called Necromance. I’ve been there a few times, so between things I had lying aroud from there and things I just had, well, lying around, I knew that I had more than enough material for the project ahead. But I decided to take some teeny little canvases I had lying around and collage on them artworks found in museum newsletters, just to give me even more options.

When I stood back to look at the bags of stuff I had collected for the project, I realized that I essentially had the contents of a little cabinet of curiosity–one of my favorite things in the world.

At the paper store, I found the most amazing oiled paper that had twine criss-crossing throughout making little compartments. The look, feel and smell of the paper reminded me of sealskin parkas or floats and the grid made by the twine was going to be just perfect for adding to that sense of museum display and classification for my 2D cabinet of curiosity.

The main question was: how to group my found objects? I could have done it according to flora, fauna, inorganic and man-made, but that seemed too clinical and would have resulted in an uneven look. In the end I tried to group things according to color and texture and that seemed to work a lot better.

I also tried to flatten and dye some of the porcupine quills, but I only had some more of the bleeding tissue paper with which to do the dying so the quills ended up only vaguely dyed, whereas my hands were all sorts of colors. I ended up using the non-dyed quills on the actual collage.

For the coins I have both antique Chinese coins and a single Roman coin. Yeah, that’s pretty old. The whale head is the broken part of a carving by a Northwest Coast Native American artist. I was heartbroken when my little whale broke, but I’ve tried to give it new life here.

The title comes from the names of the muses of history and astronomy and the goddess of arts and crafts. The natural history museum where I used to work had a statue of the “three muses” of art, history and science in its rotunda building; that’s where I got the idea from.

2008