Hello everyone! I hope you are enjoying the twinkling lights at this beautiful time of the year and getting ready to launch into 2017 with great energy, new inspirations and fresh ideas. I have come to the end of my year-long journey of the #collagediet! You might know already that I committed myself to create three collages a week throughout the year and ended it with a daily countdown in December. As I had written about this a year ago, these are collage works on watercolour paper – 6″ x 6″ and 8″ x 8″. The cut-outs come from Vogue magazine, my one and only muse for years now. They are pieces of clothing, objects, body parts that I distort into an abstract form, maintaining a kinetic, life-like energy without referencing the body itself. The drawings are my responses to the exciting textures and lines in the cut-outs or whatever inspires me to build on them. I have to admit that towards the end, it was very hard for me to keep up with the challenge. I felt stuck in the format and I didn’t have enough space in my brain or much time this year to break away from it and change it up. There were a lot of ideas that I had planned to explore but never got a chance. I did take a very fascinating printing course at Open Studio, called Collograph in the hope to incorporate some new techniques and medium into my work but I realized I needed much more learning and practice to do that. Despite the fact that I was dragging my feet in the past two months, a lot of interesting forms, shapes and compositions emerged from this whole exercise. I ended up with 191 entirely different collages this year and 100 from December 2015 when this whole madness started. Not all of them are great, and sometimes there is repetition but I have a lot of interesting and intriguing pieces as a result. This process has changed my visual language significantly. I enjoy the simplicity even more everyday! I was immensely satisfied with the subtle fragment exhibition that I had in September with Helen Liene Dreifeld and I am hoping to build on that concept. Overall, it was a very productive and exciting year with having this challenge on my plate and my role at Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition which started simultaneously in January 2016. I am happy that I made it to the finish line no matter what! At the moment, I don’t know what is next in my practice. I think I would like to take a break and actually take the time to go through the works, ponder over all of last year and digest what happened. I never got the time to step back and evaluate. I need time to think about how to expand on some the ideas that emerged and continue learning about printing. I also want to consider exhibiting these works in different set-ups and groupings other than the Instagram/digital format. They are very different and have much more character in person 😉. Lots to think about but for now I am just resting my scissors and getting our fancy champagne glasses out to celebrate the end and new beginnings in style!
Happy New Year everyone!
You can see all the pieces here on my instagram.
