Hope, Collage, and Spring

At the crossroads

I’m preparing to install an art show in my local library this coming week. As part of the process, I took out all the work that I thought I might want to show. Boxes of artist books and framed pieces from the last few years are all over the floor of my studio as I sift through them. Framed collages that I put up at my last art show, in February of 2020, have been disassembled. Those pieces from only a few years ago feel very dated compared to what I’m making now.

I started a daily collage practice during the pandemic. It was a way to learn as much as I could about making collages, and about my own style and way of working. It also felt like a quiet, attainable goal in a sometimes impossible day. I so needed hope in those months of feeling stuck in my small house that was serving as an office, a bakery, and a school. It was an escape and a promise that it wouldn’t always be like that. Since my show is going up now, at this time of year, I have many of the same feelings. Of feeling a little stuck in winter, when it can be hard to get out for a walk on the icy roads. Of still having snow days, where my daughter is home from school and therefore my attention is splintered in many ways.

Being the studious former art student that I am, I felt like my show needed a theme. As I was getting out more recent collages and looking at them all together, I realized that most of them feature golden yellows, pale to cerulean blues, and fresh, alive greens. I looked out my window, at the snow flurries that have come back after a warm stretch, and realized that the colors made me think of spring. Of that new, bright green that can only be described as electric, even though it is much more than that. Of the robin’s egg blue sky, that pops against the green. And of the growing heat of the sun that slowly warms the ground so little green things can start to peek out.

When I began focusing on the theme of hope, I needed to find the famous Emily Dickinson quote, which felt even more fitting than I expected. It’s probably not an accident that my go to character to create when I’m in a slump is a bird.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

That’s a good place to leave you this week, with hope and spring around a near corner. For more news on my show, please visit my website. Thanks so much for following along here!