Assignment 7: Collaging your Work

For Assignment 7 we are given the task of bringing our work from some or all of the exercises in this Project into one collage. I was a bit dismayed when I read the instructions for this assignment because I had no idea how to combine these desperate elements into a unified image. I wished I had read ahead to the assignment and planned my responses to the exercises a bit more coherently. Then I stopped thinking that. I remembered my response to the collages I studied in the Research Task, and my resolve to try using what is to hand rather than over-planning my work. This is an ideal opportunity to put this into practice.

I began by bringing together my images onto one page so that I could consider them collectively rather than just as a series of unconnected images.

This helped me to see connections. Bringing together the holiday accessories, spectacles and ostentatious shoe, I could see a collection of things people wear. In the Childhood sketches I noticed again the drawing of wellie boots and mentally added them to the collection. I disregarded the sea and the rest of the Childhood drawings as they didn’t fit the theme.

Next came the question of how to bring these images of apparel into one collage. I started to imagine scenarios in which hats, spectacles, sunglasses, shoes and boots would be found together. I had three ideas: a changing room, such as we had at school, with rows of hooks and benches; a shop display of accessories in a clothes shop; a group of people wearing the clothes (the latter prompted by my research into Julie Cockburn’s use of vintage photographs). I went to Google Images to collect some inspiration.

As you can see, I was most interested in the vintage photos. The changing room photos left me wondering where I would put the spectacles and sunglasses, so I quickly moved on from that idea. The search on shop displays yielded images of mannequins, something I hadn’t considered, so I stayed with that awhile and gave it more serious consideration than I did the changing room. However, I really liked the idea of trying out Cockburn’s approach of collaging with vintage images. Initially I looked at mother and child images as they seemed to fit my items to be collaged. Then I thought it might be more fun to see those ostentatious shoes on a man. Throughout these, it was surprisingly difficult to find photos that included people’s feet within the frame. My search quickly became predominantly about finding suitable feet! Having accumulated a selection of potential images, I went through them again, looking at the angles of the feet. I liked the group of young men looking cool and smoking, and the feet were at the right angles, more or less, as were the heads for the glasses. So I chose this image as the base for my collage. 

Next, I resized my own images to fit the base image when printed at A3. I did this by opening the base image in Photoshop and adding each of my collages in a new layer and placing it where I would glue it down. I did want to make the collage physically rather than digitally, so I didn’t try to integrate my images, I just sized them by placement, then deleted the first layer, which was the base photograph. I then printed the resulting set of images.

They were very small and quite fiddly to cut out, but my small pointy scissors helped with that. Then I stuck them down.

Then I left it alone for a couple of hours and went and did other things. During that time my collage was brewing in the back of my mind. I liked the subtlety of making such small changes to the original image. At a first glance it looked almost normal but those small details seemed to hook my eye and make me look again. However, I decided that I wanted to add something fairly minimal to make them stand out a little bit more and to unify the image. 

I used red thread to backstitch around the heads and collaged feet, and trace lines, following contours in the photograph, connecting the collaged elements. There is something very satisfying about sewing on paper and it’s too long since I last did this! As with Eugenia Loki’s work, I felt that the threads and apparel could spur some sort of story or narrative. I don’t know what this might be, but perhaps viewers would construct their own stories about these young men and their strange, connected, accessories.

This was a very interesting and inspiring Project, throughout all the exercises and the assignment. It made me think about collage in new ways, and reminded me of some old ones. This last image reminds me of drawing glasses, moustaches and weird hairstyles on people’s black and white photos in the newspapers of my childhood. Creating the black and white sea picture was in particular a new technique to me, and one that I’d like to try again with different subject matter. I also found researching the two women in the previous post very illuminating and really enjoyed trying out bringing elements of their processes into my Assignment piece, Overall, I think this is the Project as a whole that I’ve most enjoyed so far in this Unit.