‘Collage is already an act of destruction’. Interview with Jeff Keen. Experimental filmmaker.
nb. These works are small experiments to produce ideas that might be developed. I began with some works in the urban landscape there I live.
I wanted to imagine different possibilities for the future and found it more difficult to imagine utopian that dystopian future. Re-greening was getting quite a lot of attention at the time. However while this is important I wonder if Re-greening solutions are human centric, and do not begin to address how we exploit the land and other animals (I guess that it might be argued that it is more than human centric if it can make some difference to global warming, and some of the problems caused by fossil fuel production and animal agriculture). They also seem solutions aimed at developed Western nations.
In the end I decided to focus on the park behind my house in Tottenham, which I have filled with people from all ethnicities, coming together to meditate, alongside a lion, and a parrot, on a world that is more just to all animals, all land and all humans.
As this work progressed I found it shifted from a general focus on relationships between human and non human animals, to a more specific focus on the North Yorkshire landscape and incorporation of a prose poem that I wrote about my experience of growing up on a farm in the area. I used fragments of previous drawings to make the collages in this later work.
I decided to look at an unusual relationship between two animals (could be a human and non-human animal) – here a tiger and a goat. I started with a series of quick drawings using felt tip pen. These are A5.
The one on the left was done with 4 single lines in two different thicknesses of felt pen. The one on the right was made by drawing with a pen in each hand at the same time.
From here I started work on a collage – choosing papers from my scrap bag, including old drawings of North Yorkshire. This is an A4 collage in my sketchbook.
I decided to try screen printing- black and white version in preparation:
I started the collage below by making four 1 minute sketches of a tiger a.
I used the black and white images to make many different versions as screen prints (about 20 in total). 5 of these 20 versions of the tiger and goat are shown below followed by 1 from the tiger and woman series:
I started the next work with quick drawings with felt tip pen – one is a single line drawing and one is drawn with a pen in both hands.
I cut out the cow and figure, and the rock – and played around with placement, before deciding I needed a second rock.
Below I have painted over the foreground rocks and made a decision about placement. This is unfinished and may be developed later.
I like the inclusion of the ‘erratic’ above. This is very evocative of the North Yorkshire landscape. Today I cut out and tore up bits of paper from previous drawings and arranged them into 5 piles of 50 different papers for collage. Then I selected 2 of my favourites from each pile, so I had 10 papers. Then I seated 5 favourites from the 10, then finally my favourite:
Next I brainstormed words connected to the erratic field (I discovered only this weekend that erratic does not mean ‘precarious balance’ as I had thought, but an object in a place to which it does not belong.
Following this I prepared 5 backgrounds that I was attracted to. I worked on the erratic on these and developed each one in response to the previous one. Here they are in order:
What I really like about this is that the erratic is (totally arbitrarily) collaged on top of a previous collage of my parents sitting room: an erratic in my parents sitting room definitely does not belong, and would indeed take up the whole space. However, my parents cottage does lie at the bottom of `Norbert where the erratic field is – so perhaps the erratic has bounded down the hill and gone through their ceiling!
I continue working on top of my parents sitting room – this time the background is the upper half of the previous collage and the ceiling has wooden beams across it.
I didn’t want to stray too far away from the idea of ‘different’ relationships between animals. The rocks, as well as the swaddling cloth are collaged (as is the background from previous work).
I want to look at Ted Hughes poems about animals in the next work. Apparently it is world poetry day today (21st March 2023). I don’t know his poems so I chose 3 at random (Horses, Amulet and The Thought Fox) and began by drawing a 5 minute response to each:
Each poem is beautiful. I love the mention of frost, red sky, and 10 still horses with curlew in ‘The Horses’. In ‘Amulet’ I love the circular nature of the poem and one thing being inside the next. In the third poem ‘The Thought fox’ I like the mention of the fox touching the branch so lightly and the clock ticking.
I’d like to work on each of these poems but I will start with the one on the left.
Another 5 minute drawing, trying to get a sense of the North Yorkshire Dales. I think I have enough info here to start a collage.
References
Lola Olufemi (2021) Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, London: Hajar Press.
Avani Ashtekar (2022). https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2022/07/15/book-review-experiments-in-imagining-otherwise-by-lola-olufemi/. (Accessed 1 March 2023)
Berger, John. (1977) Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin.
Max Haiven (2014) Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power, Canada: Fernwood publishing.
Drawing As Critique 