Putting It All On The Table
In life as it is in the studio
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A bit of a double entendre in the title of this one. A very real homecoming for my love of collage. The core of my art life, from fledgling beginnings until just a few years ago, all tied to my passion for paper and glue.
Over the past two years I’ve explored other mediums, resurrected early passions for sculpture and assembly, allowing myself to be a beginner in mediums I’d only previously dabbled in with how they related to collage.
This week I’ve put it all on the table, the painted papers—the cold wax and the acrylic. The dyed ones and the magazine monoprints and the ones with encaustic. The weathered ones left to the elements for the better part of a year. The wild Momigami experimenting with it all. The more I explored the further away from my core I thought I was, until I put it all on the table and a new series of collage works was born.
Truer to who I am in this moment. Fuller, more confident in the knowing.
A nod to the past few years of stripping down and rebuilding of my own core self. The part of me I thought I knew so well and then suddenly with the diagnosis of Autism, I had to look back at it all again.
I could see myself with clarity. All the pieces of my past, suddenly fit together by this one explanation. The way I walk through the world, experience it as an alien with trembling and wonder. Having to sort through all the scraps and bits of memory, and science, and spirit to answer the questions it brought to the surface.
If this is true, then what about that? And this? And where does this one fit?
Little by little it all came together. This is who I am. No one part will define me. No one trait or moment in time, not the wrinkled one or the pink, not the stitched together or the deconstructed.
Only in the bringing together of each disparate piece am I me. To know me is to embrace it all. Right here in the now.
Putting it all on the table.
So much "stripping down," for all of us in the last few years. Our bare bones of our realness.
Thank you for putting this out there.
Beautifully penned!