We need room to experiment. Freedom and flexibility. We need to think of things unbounded. Unrestricted. Beyond what’s been done before. But, if we’re honest about most of the spaces we’re given to work with on the internet, it’s nothing more than little boxes. Little windows. Little frames.
Perhaps, that’s no bad thing. Some of the best work takes place within parameters and constrictions. Inevitably, someone will come along and subvert the expectations of what can be done in small rectangles and squares.
Someone like
and her illustrated essays, who takes the static fixtures and format of a newsletter and makes them something other. Something different. Something better. Something more.She gave me the idea that maybe instead of simply making a collage to accompany an essay, I could make a collage-essay. An essay that is the collage. A collage that is the essay.
Unfortunately, despite my efforts, every attempt failed. Maybe it's a lack of talent, a lack of craft, planning, or skill. A lack of resources or equipment. Maybe I was too naive or too ambitious. Maybe I bit off more than I can chew. Maybe I went about it in all the wrong ways. Who's to say?
Regardless, I'm grateful to Candace for the inspiration. For the eye-opening experience of getting to see what's possible here. Even if I couldn't live up to it. Maybe one day I will.
Below the essay you’ll find just a few of my attempts at a collage essay.
What does it mean to be a garden in winter, Candace Rose Rardon asks? To be exposed to the harshest of things? The worst of what the world has to offer us? Surely more than we can think or say
What does it mean to be stripped of all vibrancy? To be alone in the colorlessness? The bleak expanse? The hushed landscape of horizonless snow? Surely more than saturated pallor. More than all the hues and wavelengths combined and subdued.
What does it mean to know that what you once had you have no longer? That what you once held you no longer can? To be constricted? To be less than you've ever been? To have dreams like leaves, cast off, shed, fallen? Surely it is more the absences.
What does it mean to store hope and faith and energy, like sugar, like water, like liturgy? To practice patience like poetry? Surely it is to know stillness and inertia as resistance. To know endurance as dormancy. To know frailty as another name for strength.
What does it mean to be a garden in winter? Surely it is to know that when longing and grace come together we call it Spring. That even though it's return is certain, it never stops feeling like a miracle.
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A few failed attempts at a collage essay? I really enjoyed your pieces. Especially after reading the essay in its normal formatting, I found myself finding nuanced differences in how the collage version felt. Hearing the original read in my head as my eyes scoured the collages images. Beautiful! Thank you!
This is really beautiful.