Monthly Archives: March 2013

005 – what if my Mum had married Kurt Schwitters?

005 - what if my Mum had married Kurt Schwitters?

005 – what if my Mum had married Kurt Schwitters?
Paper, altered digital self portrait, pencil and ink 305mm x229mm

I have taken the pledge

The other day – a day when I had visited the Kurt Schwitters show at Tate Britain for the second time –  I started to get caught by the Tweets of Patti Agapi (@MadwithRapture), an artist from Orillia, Ontario, Canada. Patti has decided to do a collage a day for a year and already she is producing some great little pieces.

Now, Patti describes herself as: “Ever evolving fine artist – abstract mixed media & collage art”. Note that! She already is doing collages every day probably, so why am I taking this on? In all my years I have rarely used collage or even assemblage (I trained as a sculptor). I probably have not done more than 20 bits of collage in my life!!! Well that sounds like a pretty good reason I suppose. It won’t do me any harm to try something new and get a bit of practice in and my work has begun to include found items and manipulated paper forms.

Another thing is I hate committing myself to anything much really – even things I really want to do! So it is quite a big thing for me to make a public commitment to produce a small work each day for a year.

Now Patti has asked me to use the hashtag #Collage365 to identify my posts on Twitter and her criteria are “a small collage a day, every day for a year…abstract, mixed media, bits of paper & scribbles.” Like I say, I am not great with making commitments, so I am not going to confine myself with a particular size, though I can’t see myself making anything particularly large at this time. And I am not so sure about only abstract or just bits of paper!  We will see.

I have been working with a mental health peer support group, incorporating creative writing and art, and a while back someone suggested our “homework” should be “something like Francesca did”. She had brought in a complex, highly textured collage she had created. I didn’t do a collage but I wrote a light-hearted ditty covering the art history of the collage which you can read at Something Like Francesca Did.