Wordplay as an art practice

Construct/Deconstruct/Reconstruct/Construct

Prerogative Collage Mixed Media by Crystal Marie

Wordplay happens when I’m in the studio, whether working on my own art or prepping for a workshop. Of course, it is all my own art, made by me, but there is a difference in the process when I am creating for the sheer pleasure of it. No particular outcome in mind. Words, sentences, song lyrics, lines of poetry or scripture, or the latest novel I’ve read, begin to fill my head, set to a rhythm, not demanding my attention, but gently prompting me to listen.

The concept for the Construct Series began while filming Small Scale Assemblage and exploring the meaning of the word assemblage: “to bring together disparate objects or concepts”. The word, it turns out, I’ve used in my own writing many times over, but now it kept niggling at me, disparate, rolling around my brain. Reappearing, highlighting itself to me in random places, until I understood what it was trying to say. I was indeed a disparate assembler. An artist whose practice began with the art of collage & assemblage, growing to encompass seemingly incompatible materials—disparate materials.

I started to see even my writing and speaking practice in this way. Challenging the norms, bringing together disparate ideas, concepts, even people, as I recognized the diversity of those I encountered through my art and words, solidifying with the understanding of my own neurodivergent wiring.

Here as the assembling of materials grew, so did the assembling of concepts. I began to construct a new way of being in life from the fragments of all that I’d been before; wife & daughter, mother & friend, grandmother, divorcée, a woman of faith, artist, human being. Deconstructing the prescribed practices of each of these roles and reconstructing it all piece by piece until it fit, felt more authentic.

And thus the word deconstructing which had always been a part of my artist vocabulary, began to take on new life & meaning. It grew from the dismantling of an object to the rebuilding. The dismantling of who I thought I was or how I had been raised to understand the world around me & the deeper meaning of it all, to the rebuilding of it as an autonomous unique grown ass woman. Creating structures in my art & my writing that at once repelled those who were challenged by my way of thinking and being & attracted those who also were searching for their place, their voice, their own way of belonging.

Those structures I’d been building—my collage works, my paintings, my assemblages, my stories, were physical representations of my nest, my internal home, the one I carried as my own sense of belonging, the knowing place. Carefully crafted bits of those fragments. Woven together constructions of my past, my present, my very core being.

In conceiving this latest series, I began toying with the word Construct and the different meaning it holds depending on the pronunciation and use, conceiving of how I would represent this with materials from the construction zone. To construct; to build an object, a visual work, while visually representing in those works ideas of society, the art world, religion, gender, race, man made systems as a construct. Those ideas and practices that were subjective and systemic, hidden or overt, setting expectations that govern our behavior and how we show up in the world.

The materials and the way I use them in the studio, have always held symbolic meaning in my work, whether used in collage work or painting. The very nature of collage in all its bits and pieces, fragments of a whole, brought together to create something new, simply beg for the artist to tell their story, the artist’s and the art work.

I’ve only recently recognized the deep grieving process I went through after dumping my entire stash of collage materials last year. It was a hard reckoning to acknowledge all those papers, a lifetime of collecting, were making me sick after being stored in my old studio for a year following the pandemic.

I posted a picture of the dumpster full of that stash, along with my collection of art books and out of print magazines, proclaiming it as some sort of clean slate victory decision, rather than the desperate act to rid my home of the airborne contaminates that it was. My system does not properly detox, it is especially triggered by the mycotoxin spores from mold and the old studio building had a leaky roof, finally infiltrating my own space during the year I hadn’t been up there.

And it was a clean slate really. One in which I threw myself into other practices and explored other mediums. I was in the process of deconstructing who I was as an artist. To the outside observer I’ve heard many times, that it looked like I’d lost my way as an artist. It’s funny, in that ironic sort of way, how even as artists we tend to conform, setting up parameters around what looks like a successful and legitimate practice.

Little by little my love of collage is reawakening. Not that it had ever left me, still, I’d not identified this process of deconstructing how I approached the craft and the way that it was sort of organically reconstructing itself until I heard myself speak those words, that I’d been grieving the loss of it all.

How do I even begin to express it properly now? Words, once again, elude me. The silence is my invitation to return to the studio.

Construct. Deconstruct. Reconstruct. Construct.

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This series of courses is reigniting something in me that I haven’t felt in a very long time. Perhaps it is simply the timing of it, but the use of these materials in all of their symbolic meaning have become an opening. I’ll be writing on the deeper meaning of some of these pieces in the coming weeks.

If you’re interested in exploring with the materials on your own, consider one of these courses, (click the images for details) and stay tuned for more to come from the construction zone.