Beneath the Layers: How I Use Mixed Media to Explore Connection and Our Environment

Do you believe that we are all connected?  As a human race?  As living things? As organisms within our environment? Even beyond that?

I feel like most of my work centers around these connections, whether intentionally or not.  I use all sorts of materials, from found ephemera, to hand painted papers, to glossy magazine ads.  I layer these in different ways to see what makes sense to me , both aesthetically and intrinsically.  

As a piece comes together, it sometimes ends up completely different from how I originally had the items layered, placed, positioned.  Not always.  Sometimes I work very intuitively, adding one piece at a time, and gluing things down as I go.  Other times, like in the piece I show here, I do a bit more planning, seeing what pieces work together and the connections that they make.

Pieces are rearranged, taken out, cut down, added in.  Until eventually, it feels finished.  How do you know a piece is finished?  Sometimes I am not sure.  I let it sit.  For days, or even weeks.  But when it is finished, the first thing I tend to notice is the links between things that seem like they have no association with each other.  Relationships between images that wouldn't normally exist.  

Of course, that's part of the fun of collage, and art in general: creating things that wouldn't normally exist.  And the best is when someone else notices those links and feels those connections, too.  And decides to purchase your artwork and hang it in their own home, where they can look at it every day.

I recently came across a poem by Everett Hoagland that seems to put how I feel into words instead of images.

 

"Invocation, by Everett Hoagland

Architect of" icebergs, snowflakes,
crystals, rainbows, sand grains, dust motes, atoms.

Mason whose tools are glaciers, rain, rivers, ocean.

Chemist who made blood
of seawater, bone of minerals in stone, milk

of love. Whatever

You are, I know this,
Spinner, You are everywhere, in All The Ever-
Changing Above, whirling around us.

Yes, in the loose strands,
in the rough weave of the common

cloth threaded with our DNA on the hubbed, spoked
Spinning Wheel that is this world, solar system, galaxy,

universe.

Help us to see ourselves in all creation,
and all creation in ourselves, ourselves in one another.

Remind those of us who like connections
made with similes, metaphors, symbols
all of us are, everything is
already connected.

Remind us as oceans go, so go we. As the air goes, so go we.
As other life forms on Earth go, so go we.

As our planet goes, so go we. Great Poet,
who inspired In The Beginning was The Word . . . ,

edit our thought so our ethics are our politics,
and our actions the afterlives of our words.