Create contradictory or new meanings by juxtaposing existing images and text through collage.
This third project further explores different relationships between text and image based on a ‘bricolage’ sketchbook of collaged photographs and mixed media mark-making for which I created meaning through adding selected text from Rebecca Solnitz ‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’. I am particularly interested in the potential of using the following quotation to extend my creative thinking and process in linking personal and political perspectives on place:
There are known knowns. The things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know… (then there are) the ‘unknown knowns,’ things we don’t know that we know… the real dangers are in the disavowed beliefs, suppositions, and obscene practices we pretend not to know about. (Solnitz p168 referring partly to Iraq and other wars and quoting philosopher Slavoj Zizek )
I produced two main series, the first from photo collage of my own images, and the second from the magazine collage and markmaking experiments. For details click on each gallery to bring up the annotated slideshow.
The way to Zennor: Unknown Unknowns
The original photographs were converted to split tone cyanotype blue and beige colours in Lightroom. Then collaged in the sketchbook as a spontaneous association of text and shapes. This came to focus particularly on the contrast between the rather menacing white of the calla lilly, the no entry signs and many warnings about adders in the dry summer. I never got to Zennor!
Getting Lost on the Way to Zennor
Beware of Adders
Lost in Procreation: Unknown knowns
These image and text collages produced in Procreate originated in collage and spontaneous mixed media mark-making with ink and my new Acryla gouache tube paints.
I then further explored two of these idea threads in Procreate to extend the meanings and linkings of text and image.
Mind landscapes
The mind can be imagined as a landscape, but only the mind of sages might resemble the short-grass prairie in which I played with getting lost and vanishing. The rest of us have caverns, glaciers, torrential rivers, heavy fogs, chasms than open up under foot, even marauding wildlife bearing family names. It’s a landscape in which getting lost is easy and some regions are terrifying to visit. (p53)
The following images in Procreate were all created as variations on the same spread, manipulating them in different ways to give different meanings and emotional interpretation of text.
Butterfly
Butterfly is so fit an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is ‘psyche’, the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate…the violence of the metamorphosis which is often spoken of as though it were graceful as a flower blooming.
The butterfly sequence of ‘metamorphoses’ are variations on the top left image which is in turn a crop selected from the middle of the same landscape image above.
I converted this to a Lightroom slideshow but only the following low resolution version would upload to this blog. I would like to do something more elaborate later in After Effects where I have much more control over compression and also the ways in which the transitions appear.