third things
I was asked recently, about the order that my work happens in. Which comes first the writing or the collages? The language or the visuals? I’m not entirely sure how to answer. They happen with such drastic separation that they hardly seem related. Neither leading. Neither following. And yet somehow, there is an unconscious conspiring toward alchemy.
I make collages every day without thinking about writing. Words and language are hard for me. My thoughts don’t come together easily. They are always tossed and tumbling. Buried and out of reach. But collage comes to me like water. It is not without it’s hinderances and obstacles, but it pivots and sways with grace. It’s a matter of presence, more than anything. Of searching and discovery. Of watching and noticing. It’s a way of feeling for parts of myself I can’t find any other way.
When I’m writing I’m not thinking about collages. The experience is almost contradictory. It’s slow and excruciating. It’s struggle and wrestling. Glaciers and agony. It’s listening for whispers in a calamitous place. It’s following after the faintest traces of what I need to hear, what I have to say, and what I wish someone would tell me.
It’s when the two come together that everything changes. The process itself elicits a whole new kind of creation. An exquisite corpse of words and vision unfolding into something unexpected and extraordinary.
“[W]e choose to see the things we know and can relate to”, Debbie Millman says, and we are so often unable “to break through existing patterns of recognition to see new things”. But when I place words beside an image and an image beside a sentence, what I see starts to change. The writing reveals a meaning in the collages I didn’t know was intended. And the words deepen into something other when the collages give them texture.
It’s not about which is first or second. It’s not a hierarchy. It’s the conversational dance that makes a third thing.
May the unfamiliar open you gently.
May each act of making lead you toward a way of seeing differently.
May a wider vision soften your certainty.
In case no one told you today, I love you with all my everything.
**special thank to Jill McDougall for sending me some of teh collage materials used in “the flexibility to endure”.
Beautifully said (:
I also struggle with writing - mostly when it’s about my work- and I think it is as you say in your post, “ It’s a way of feeling for parts of myself I can’t find any other way.‘ and that’s why the translation into language is so hard- you are literally trying to translate feeling and visions into words - a very very difficult if not impossible task