Manipulation-Collaboration
a 100-day-long project starting May 22, 2010About
About Me
Hi! I am an artist and adjunct Art History instructor at Tunxis Community College. I have been an illustrator, art director, layout artist as well as a watercolorist selling to sail boaters from a gallery on St. John USVI. I felt, sew, paint, pot, make jewelry… and usually find myself creating in many other ways as well. For the last several years I have not made enough time to use my creative energy as I focused on a career in fundraising. I am pleased to join this group which will force me to get creative in a tactile, messy, hands-on, totally satisfying way every single day for 100 days. I can’t wait to see where it will take me!
About this project, Manipulation Collaboration
I have always loved paper. I love its strength, utility and ephemeral quality. I love that it is readily available, inexpensive, and transformable. I’m a napkin shredder and reflexively fold puppets and paper cranes out of junk mail. So I knew I would be working with PAPER.
I needed to set some parameters. I decided to manipulate a piece of paper 14”x17” every day by painting,writing, drawing, printing, glueing taping piercing, dyeing, sewing, folding, stamping whatever….Taking inspiration some days from the video work of John Timmons and my fellow 100 dayers and some days from my own brainfire. And because sometimes what holds me back a little is the “preciousness” of works in progress (trying not to “ruin” the page can be a real dam in the river of creative flow). I have decided to purposefully destroy the original by chopping apart the finished manipulated paper.
I will cut the sheet into 2- 8 1/2” x 11” pieces. One of them I will preserve whole and the other I will quarter into 4 postcard size pieces. These smaller accidental compositions themselves will force new ways of looking at the original concept. These will be stamped on the back with my address and a number indicating the day which they were produced and a letter indicating the position of the fragment in the original work of art. . I will distribute them after 100 days to 400 people using a network of friends and interested people. Each person who accepts one (collaborators) will be asked to manipulate the face of the postcard on top of my images adding a drawing, poem, musing, observation, painting, glued on element more holes whatever and mail it back to me.
I will have had something in mind when creating the original piece, a thought, an emotion.. something. I will be interesting to see if what I was thinking carried through in the fragment that was received and re imagined and if the new artist responded to the original”vibe” or if my composition inspired a totally new direction of thought. . Finally, I will then assemble the four postcards next to the piece of “virgin” artwork for an entirely new piece of collaborative art.
