re-cognizing
So much of collage is about matter out place. Things cut from their context and then re-situated, re-imagined, and re-arranged. Things that are familiar are made foreign so that we can re-familiarize ourselves with them. In the process we arrive at a new knowledge that feels like something we’ve always known.
Carl Jung says that “all cognition is akin to recognition”. We can only arrive at a cognitive understanding by re-cognizing something we already understand. And by doing so we come to a fresh understanding of everything we thought we knew.
Everyday at my work bench I watch images shift, and morph, and change. Pictures once coherent become abstracted and unrecognizable. Fragments orphaned and alien are moved around a substrate until at some point, somehow, someway, it starts to feel like home. Like a long forgotten place I can still feel and imagine even as I struggle to re-member it’s name.
Discovery and familiarity are intertwined like lovers enraptured in inseparability. An unfolding mutuality of reciprocal exchange. An intimacy between the inner life and the outer world. Ian McGilchrist calls it a “responsive evocation”- “the world ‘calling forth’ something in me that in turn ‘calls forth’ something in the world.” Something that feels new emerges from the mundane, it calls out to what feels strange and uncanny within ourselves, and then through it’s re-framing we garner a revelatory insight into the nature of who and what we have always been.
Making, then, is a matter of self-re-cognition. We come to an awareness of ourselves indirectly. Through texture and form and rhythm. Through color and contrast and resistance. The self revealed in the encounter is not the one we think we know. Not the surface level self of signs, symbols, titles, and identities. Instead we witness a sense of the dynamic flux and timbre of our own becoming. When we make things, the self that arises is an emergent property that evolves with and alongside the work itself. It is an outward reflection of our truest internality given body and shape. What it demonstrates is not novelty necessarily, but instead a veracity that we can cling to; the fact that when I can recognize something right in a composition, I simultaneously recognize that there’s still something right in me too.
May you re-cognize yourself in the process of making.
May you always find a miracle within the mundane
May you always see the world anew.
In case no one’s told you today, I love you with all my everything.
***A very special thanks to Susanne Helmert for giving me an amazing selection of her photogram fragments to collage with. Two were used in “the beginning of involvement”. You can see more of her photograms here and here.
This might be my favorite post you’ve shared to date. I got shivers reading and reflecting on how, through creating, we can de-familiarize ourselves from our own life/story/understanding and meet it anew.
Can’t wait to begin our work together next week!
It’s interesting how, upon seeing something new, we reach for the similarities we already know in order to negotiate it in our minds. “That person/place/thing reminds me of…”.
That first piece of work up there is so great. I’ll look at it more in IG. Have a good Wednesday, Duane.