In the winter my apartment is cold, except for one room that is blissfully pellet-stove temperature controlled. The cat loves the one warm room. The cold - not so much. Me neither. My limited table space by the stove means that, in winter, I concentrate almost exclusively on very small-scale paper projects. In my cold studio room my hands and brain freeze up and I lose the will and the ability to hold an exacto blade or do anything much at all.
On a recent walk I found the bedraggled paper packaging from a nasty "befana" doodad, left over from the last day of the endless Christmas season. In Italy the holidays seem to last an entire month. No one really goes back to "work" until mid January. There it was laying on the Ponte Clementino. It had a scallop-edged handle, to allow tiny fingers to grip it more easily before it was ripped, unceremoniously, to shreds to get at the Chinese-made tat inside. Pleasing shape, so I picked it up, took it home, stiffened it with liquid medium, and used it to cut scallop-edged shapes from a mountain of ephemera in my workroom.
A word about picking stuff up off the ground: I come from a long line of proud and shameless garbage-pickers. My mother grew up in the Depression and stopped everywhere to pick up change from the ground. She also picked up discarded furniture, cut logs left by the side of the road, and almost anything else that she came across. We all crouched down in the back seat of the car in shame, or pretended not to know her at all (teenage years), terrified that we'd be seen by classmates in the act of garbage-picking. With age one loses any feeling of shame and develops a sense of wonder about discarded things and an appreciation for what they have endured. Yeah, it's dirty and potentially nasty, but my mother always said that found money was lucky and who can ignore free (if beschmutzed) luck? And a girl naturally needs all the luck she can get as she matures. As I walk my eyes are constantly trained on the ground looking for dog shit, and sometimes I find interesting things that I take home and re-use instead of excrement. Sometimes I even manage not to step in the dog shit. I figure I've found at least twenty dollars or so in cash money, so averaged over all the miles I've walked in that process I guess I have earned about 1/100,000 of a cent per mile or so. But every one of those cents, pence, eurocents, centimes, drachmas was LUCKY! I am perpetually grateful for every single bit of luck.
Back to the collages. Doctors in the family/genes. The diagrams are a bit creepy but so lovingly and carefully executed. One Seattle Library sale yielded a Manual of Operative Surgery from Fort Worden, late 19th century. One of my favorite Christmas present books from my mother was a book entitled Oddities and Curiosities of Medicine. It impressed me for life. Perhaps scarred is a better word? Sadly it has been lost in one of my many moves, but I still seem to come across them regularly and I always love poring over them. So, diagrams were culled, cut, scalloped. Italian 1908 magazine pages (junk shop find in December - wonderful BLUE pages) were also culled and scalloped, etc etc. Lather, rinse, repeat. Exacto knife kept me busy for many happy hours, and all nine seasons of Cold Case on the DVD player and a contented cat kept me company and entertained.
There were enough diagrams for a dozen. Here are a few, and the rest are viewable, if you are so inclined, on my flickr photostream. What do you think? Too gory? Too blue? Too scalloped? Just right?
Contents list: Medical diagrams, commercial paper, monoprinted paper, magazine images 1910-1950s, Italian train record book, found envelope, nautical map, old photographs and photographic postcards, Italian medical textbook, atlas of the ancient world, vintage children's book illustration, Fabriano Rosaspina paper, PVA glue.