Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Dot Dot Dot

I've started working on a series of very tiny collages, not much bigger than postage stamps. As with most of my recent collage work, the process is simple: I cut one bird shape out from a two-sided image in a bird guide and lay it over text. I've been working on these types of things for a while now. Here's an example from a recent series of twelve collages (for these I cut out part of the image itself):

I've always been a lot more interested in what goes unstated or unseen...the things that are left to the imagination, and make the book, the picture, the song, a personal, intimate thing. Given this, it will come as no surprise that the ellipsis is my very favorite punctuation mark. And, lucky for me and my collages, the ellipsis seemed to be Daphne du Maurier's favorite as well. You can barely turn a page of The King's General without seeing one. This may explain why I love her books so much -- there are holes and shadows, places where language falls and fails, and so much has to be created in the reader's mind. The ellipsis, like the trail of bread crumbs Hansel and Gretel dropped in the forest, points one in a direction but stops just short of taking one by the hand...