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I’m not sure if this one is finished. I had envisioned many more fragments of words falling and heaped up, and I’m not sure if I paused here because it is done, or because I got tired of gluing tiny rectangles of paper. I’ll look at it afresh tomorrow and see.
Postscript : it wasn’t finished. See my next post.
Looking at these gives me the same feeling in my gut as the feeling I’m trying to express. That tells me I’m going in the direction I want to go.
I said I wasn’t going to post most of the art I was doing because I didn’t want the performance pressure. It turns out that the lure of publishing works-in-progress is important. It keeps me accountable to someone besides myself, without which I can go weeks without making art.
So I’ll start posting daily again, as with the leaves I drew from January to June. And as with the leaves, if on a particular day I don’t want to share what I made, fine, I won’t.
But today, because and (sigh) only because I intended to post here, I honored the promise I made to myself several months ago and brought my tea down to the art room, where I blissfully cut, arranged, and pasted until the tea was cold and forgotten. I’m going to do some more in this vein. I already have some ideas for tomorrow’s experiment.
I would be interested to hear what thoughts and feelings these (this and the ones to follow) bring up in viewers, so I think I won’t title them or say what they are about for me, yet.
(c) 2021 Amy Zucker Morgenstern
The room is pretty much finished, the art supplies are sorted though still awaiting their shelves, and I sat down to make something from those boxes of “collage materials,” a.k.a. “interesting bits of paper that we don’t want to throw away, so let’s call them art supplies.” It’s not a lie, but it’s just this side of hoarding. Unless, of course, you actually make collages out of them.
I’m grateful to my colleague Barbara for posting her beautiful collages and connecting me to a collage artists’ group online, and to my friend Jess, who also posts her collages frequently. They all inspire me.
I retrieved this collage from the pieces-in-progress box, where I had filed it just the other day in the course of going through some piles in our home office. (The Onion, as usual, is sardonically accurate; after two weeks of the coronavirus shutdown, our house task list is noticeably whittled down.) I began it, a few years ago, with some playful, purposeless clipping of an old Thomas guide, which I had bought when I moved here in 2003 and which was rendered redundant within a few years, when I got my first smartphone. Redundant for navigation, but a gem in the collage-materials collection.
As soon as I started playing, the similarities between map features like freeways and anatomical drawings of veins and arteries appeared. Also, I kept noticing places that had a strong emotional tug: hospitals where many of our congregation members have been patients, a cemetery where some have been interred, and, snaking their way down page upon page of the book of maps, the railroad tracks where two have died. And just like that, it became a portrait: of a place, of tender moments from a shared history, and of relationships.
It’s complicated. Many of the moments have been sad, even heartbreaking ones. There’s a tremor of trauma running through this landscape. But joy runs through it too, and sometimes in the same places. Finishing this collage helped me integrate them.
Any ideas for a title about the body, loss, place, lives and deaths, finding one’s way . . . ?
Sermons in Stones 
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