I diligently got my mom and sister to write over the top of letters and photocopied and enlarged, rotated , overlapped by photocopying onto photocopied paper to arrive at a range of papers. I didn’t become excited by this process.
these manipulation s in an app called MegaPhoto are an excellent example of getting carried away!!!
I feel that there is a not so fine balance here of artistic intent and very clever technical wizardry that leads you down a path of distraction. I’m guessing that , if avoiding those dangers a spark of an idea could be created.
I imported one of the images that I had manipulated into the Procreate app and block coloured the background, then created a tiled pattern. Nothing spectacular, however I can see that with some experience there is scope for using digital manipulation as a useful tool. As I noted in the collage project there is also a danger of getting lost and carried away.
Cutting holes and reassembling , I haven’t investigated very thoroughly, for example the holes could be circular. Different sizes, random, I could weave , rip , shred – actually veryfine shred rearranged appeals- this is an example of the process of experimentation working!
I chose a section of the overwritten letter to explore further by stitching over the top onto a piece of cotton voile. The reverse of the stitched piece has much more textural interest than the electronic manipulation, the loose threads and dots of black thread pulled through to the back are much more interesting than pixels to me. Using frottage to rotate, offset and repeat in a different colour has given an interesting set of drawings.
I needed to soak the photocopy paper to remove sections, with thinner paper I could remove this more easily and achieve a wider selection of negative shapes, texturally this reminds me of the bark of a plane tree.
Reflecting on the creation of further letters, I had considered writing to my younger and older self, this ties in with links to ancestors in the collage project. Asking myself the question of who am I?- we are a sum of many parts. This collage is of me with the combined letter from my mother, my sister, myself.
I got more from this exercise than I expected as to be honest I just wasn’t inspired at all by the brief and went through the stages quite mechanically. There is some real strength in the stitched and frottaged piece and I certainly wouldn’t have got there without the earlier processes.
For me the textile related pieces are more interesting visually, they have more gravitas and feel more intentional. The graphic pieces have more of a feeling of accidental design, more contrived and less interesting.
some of the difficulty here was the personnel nature of using a letter, this felt too intimate and exposing of self. The ability to do this, is part of the success of many artists, Tracey Emin is a clear example of not holding anything back. Art can be cathartic in this way.