The Pieces of My Personal Collage History: Fragments & Gestalt

The following is an expanded version of an article I wrote in 2023 after attending the fabulous collage conference, KolajFest. Once I was home in my studio, my head was spinning with so many thoughts, ideas and a desire to research my own personal history relating to collage.

You’re all over the place!, she said

Through all of the talks and presentations at Kolaj Fest, I started to think about where my own work fits into it all. I have reacted to the trauma of the world’s response to Covid by going through a bit of a transition in my work…a really lonnng transition. One could say my work is ‘all over the place’. In fact, several people have said those exact words…and I didn’t take it well. With some thought, I realized that it’s not really all over the place. The series' may look different, but it all fits under the umbrella of collage; adhering little bits together to make a bigger bit. This concept (Gestalt) is what my work has always been about, at least tangentially, within the context of process. In the last decade, I have unfortunately forgotten the importance of the meaning of collage as it pertains to the making of my work. Once I remembered this, I relaxed and took an easy breath…my work, and me as an artist, both have a place. If it weren’t for Kolaj Fest and the thought provoking discussion, I wouldn’t have had this very important personal realization. As a result, I decided to take a trip through my personal collage journey over the years, starting with an excerpt from my graduate school thesis paper, written 2001-03. Scroll down to see a small sampling of encaustic work made between 2003-06 and that best illustrates the ideas of Gestalt.

Fragments

“Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally exhaustible in forms."[1] I am interested in raising questions in the viewer’s mind concerning how all of creation, the universe, earth, nature and humanity, coexist, connect and interweave in the physical, biological and physiological sense.

My work is a manifestation of the compiling and arranging of fragments. Each takes on new form and new meaning, as the content shifts with the addition or subtraction of another element. Fragments of fabrics are combined with fragments of thread to form a panel, which is a fragment itself until its arrangement with two other panels to complete the whole. Each individual panel remains as a complete unit and can stand alone as a significant entity. Yet each panel also contributes to the whole in it’s own way to create something greater than it could have been had it existed alone. Ideas of “grouping” or characteristics of stimuli causing us to structure or interpret a visual field in a certain way are the primary factors of Gestalt Theory. [2] Utilizing the formal characteristics of Gestalt while also employing a visceral language of organic life is the manner in which the pieces are assembled.

The principles of Gestalt can be applied to many things, however my interest lies in the way it can be applied to nature and the biological sciences. In fact, before scientists could decipher what it was that constituted organic form, biologists first had to define what organic form actually was in recognized terms. Gestalt was used as a building block to do that as this comparison of organic vs. inorganic form states: “ Form in living beings is more complex than form in non-living nature and that the form of living organisms or their remains is a property of the whole, while in non-living entities form results from the disposition of the parts of which they were composed. The interdependence of part and whole was the principal element of novelty in the idea of organic form, by which it represented a departure from the continuity principle of the great scale of being, according to which organisms had of course been recognized as ‘higher’ than inert substances."[3] Defining the attributes of organic form in this manner led the way toward the development of the cell theory in which it was discovered that all living matter was comprised of cells which not only perform “processes of division, growth, or membrane formation” within an organism, but dictate the structure of the organism depending upon how they are “combined together.”[4] Portraying this simple commonality between all life forms in a visual way is the foremost proponent behind the making of my work.

Although I am not consciously thinking of these formal terms and philosophies as I assemble the pieces, my work does embody these principles, thus imparting inner unity, harmony and movement. Through unconscious but thoughtful manipulation of the materials and forms, symbiotic qualities begin to emerge and the eye begins to travel through, across and around the piece. “The effect of apparent movement is generated not so much by its individual elements as by their dynamic interrelation.”[5] Visual harmony and movement is critical as each part maintains it’s own significance to the work, yet they flow together as one. Because of this visual flow and movement, the work springs forth with vitality and rhythmic energy. “The importance of the fragment, because of it’s potential to grow, is therefore heightened.”[6]

My objective is to employ the principles of the whole in both the philosophical and poetic sense. Ultimately, I wish to question the relationship of the individual vs. the group and the microscopic vs. the macroscopic. In other words, how all of the universe and natural world is a constantly moving, changing, flowing whole. Emerson illustrates this idea beautifully, “A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time, is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.”[7]

Notes

[1] Ritterbush, The Art of Organic Forms, p. 20.

[2] Behrens Roy R., Art, Design and Gestalt Theory, (https://www.corneeksteen.com/PDF/Gestalt.pdf). Proximity-items grouped together according to their nearness; similarity-items similar in some way are grouped together; simplicity-organization according to symmetry, regularity and smoothness; closure-grouped together if they complete something.

[3] Ritterbush, The Art of Organic Forms, p. 25.

[4] Ibid., p. 30.

[5] Ibid., p. 29.

[6] Stoops, Susan L., Michelle Stuart: Silent Gardens, The American Landscape, (Waltham Massachusetts, Brandeis University, 1988), p. 10. Hereafter cited as Stoops, Silent Gardens, The American Landscape.

[7] Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “The American Scholar”, in Emerson on Transcendentalism, ed. by Edward L. Ericson (New York, Ungar, 1986), p. 26. Hereafter cited as Emerson, Transcendentalism.