Love is a Battlefield

I was so excited last week; we were finally going to work on boxes in collage class! But all week long I couldn’t think of what to do! I was so demoralized–this was the reason why I wanted to take the class! In the end, I loaded up my bags full of whatever I could find, grabbed the smallest of the cigar boxes I had lying around and headed to class only with the vaguest notion that I wanted to do something with gold wedding bands and making them look like chain mail.

Well, the result was somewhat surprising. The inside is a warm, inviting tableau with roses and a deep, rich purple color. The outside is wedding band-chain mail and .38 special shell casings.  I’d like to be able to say that this represents a tough attitude outside, protecting a soft interior, but I think it is actually more reflective of the idea that love is a battlefield. Sigh.

Since last week when I shot this, I have cleaned up the purple edges with some paint so it doesn’t look so sloppy.

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

The Dark Side of Sex

This was another card I made for myself. It’s a tad bitter, I realize, but I was realizing (once again) just how sex can severely alter my sense of the reality of a situation, hence, the dark side. I was also thinking about how when you remove emotion from sex, all that is left are the seemy and all-too-physical paraphernalia associated with sex–the lace stockings, the condoms, the birth control pills. This is sort of my rejection of the physicality of sex in hopes of finding something a little more uplifting.  Circa 2006

All That Remains

This is the card I crafted for myself that started me down the path that eventually led to this blog. It is a Strathmore blank card embellished with red sequins, virginal white wedding trim, various hearts–some of which are upside down–metal charms and ephemera remaining from the relationship that had ended, such as a matchbox, rose petals and a ticket stub. Circa 2006