Some Assembly Required

I was the kid with the coveted Crayola 64 pack of crayons, the kind with the built in sharpener on the box. I’ve dabbled in watercolours, oils, acrylics, pastels, charcoal, sculpting. I collect art supplies compulsively. I’m a chronic doodler. The margins of my school notes were always choked with half finished drawings. To this day I become gripped by near obsessive creative phases that eventually fizzle out and leave me with a collection of pieces that get given away or sit quietly in stacks between music scores and cookbooks. I always start these phases feeling like I am drawing my ideas from an endless well. I dip my bucket confidently in, again and again, until I hear it thud against the bottom with a dry echo. Then I put away my supplies, take stock of what I’ve made, and wait for the next phase to strike. I rarely return to whatever had once gripped me, with one notable exception. There’s always been something encouraging about the presence of pre-formed elements. Making art with them is not as daunting as painting on a blank white canvas, or sculpting nothing into something. In fact, it’s art that’s already halfway to existing, with some assembly required.

As a chiId I did a lot of crafting in my basement, which was clogged and cluttered with various holiday decorations, unused exercise equipment and near-archeological layers of items no one could bear to throw away. It’s the kind of basement that I’m sure so many people whose grandparents lived through the depression are familiar with. One that seems, in some unconscious way, prepped and ready for the swift and inevitable return of scarcity. As a preteen I would spend hours down there alone, having cleared myself a small area to sit and work, and make elaborate spreads in a large green scrapbook I had received for some birthday or other. It was the kind with a big soft cover, and had come with a bevy of stickers, jewels and other accoutrements, as well as a stack of thick cardstock in various patterns and colours. The basement was always cool, even in the summer, and had a soft, familiar mildew scent that I found comforting. It was nice to be alone, with only the drone of a small grey SONY tv for company.

I had hit one of those pivotal moments in life where you suddenly become aware that you’re not quite the same person you’ve previously known yourself to be. At that particular juncture I was being thrust out of the crystal clear pond of childhood and into the dank murky swamp of adolescence. I became obsessed with documenting moments that already seemed to be slipping so far away. Often a single photo would sit at the centre of a large spread, flocked by several layered borders that I had trimmed to size or a gaggle of wonky paper stars that I had cut out painstakingly by hand with our good pair of kitchen scissors. The photos were the glossy 4x6’’ prints that you would pick up from the local Walgreens in a cardboard envelope, after they had been developed from the beat up family camera or a Kodak disposable. In my house these photos were everywhere, stuck with magnets to the fridge, leafed between the pages of half-read books, and packed into various small plastic tubs and wicker baskets. They seemed to be stuffed into every available empty drawer. A thousand palm sized paper reminders of the human desire to document. I would choose ones that struck me as particularly deserving of being memorialized even further, and would carefully assemble all of the elements, erecting my paper monuments to memory.

In middle and high school, collage was a ubiquitous form of expression among teenage girls. We pieced together our dream wardrobes, bodies, and very lives from a myriad of glossy paper sources which we would trade amongst ourselves like currency. I still have stacks of old seventeen magazines, which were pored over once or twice before being mercilessly mined for valuables. It was bliss when we were allowed to spend a quiet hour in art class making school sanctioned collages which we would then show each other and pick apart like seasoned art critics. You always felt lucky when you would end up with one of the good pairs of scissors for the day, or a glue stick that wasn’t dry and crumbling. Combining the seemingly random scraps effectively was a coveted ability. It was crucial that the collages weren’t too busy or too bare. Negative space was a tactic that could be used only by the most skilled among us, as it often simply looked like we just couldn’t find the perfect piece to fill the gap, which would stare out from the page like an accusatory white eye. Elaborate collage birthday cards would be gifted with reverence. One girl I knew effectively wallpapered her entire bedroom with her collages. These exercises in careful combination are damn near poetically reflective of the experience of teenage girlhood. Bombarded with images and expectations, we rifle through, scissors ready, and assemble ourselves out of so many bits and pieces. We wait patiently to be critiqued, or hung on someone’s wall to be looked at.

In my last year of college I slipped away from myself in that easy-to-do way. I had experienced a keen heartbreak that flattened over time into something dull and ugly. I was sitting at the corner of who I had been, and who I would become, and couldn’t seem to move in either direction. I hadn’t made anything for a long time, I felt too tired, too empty. Blank canvases and sketchbook pages threatened to swallow me whole if I stared at them for too long. But I worked in the campus print shop. I ran off essays for frazzled students and posters for school events, and I had endless access to shelves full of an Office Max worthy spread of paper and stationary. When I wasn’t busy, I would sit and cut out different shapes with the pair of scissors we kept in the stationary cup. I placed and re-placed them until I was happy. It was relaxing. It was cathartic. It was, in so many ways, easy. I didn’t have to make the art, I just had to find it and put it together. I would draw on the paper, something I was proud of, and then cut it to shreds. Nothing’s here forever. But those shreds would get collaged back together, or end up as part of other pieces. Nothing’s gone forever, either. If I was unhappy with a part of a drawing, I simply cut it off and replaced it with something else. How freeing. I felt so close to that version of myself who could focus on a task for a seemingly limitless amount of time. I would come up for air after hours of drawing, cutting and gluing with a crick in my neck and a deep sense of satisfaction. It wasn’t quite like collaging when I was young, obsessed with documenting the past. And it didn’t feel like those adolescent collaging years either, when the future looked so much more enticing than anything around me. This experience was more an amalgamation of those two, swirled in with who I was in that present moment. My ideas, words, and thoughts. What I was experiencing, what was around me. A collage if you will. Indeed we all, over the course of our lives, become one of those collages that is made up of so many small shreds that it eventually forms one large, cohesive image, the colours blending indistinguishably together. When I look closely at myself, I am built of an innumerable amount of moments, memories, and messages, each their own distinct size, shape and colour. When I zoom back out, I can see myself as I am. A whole picture, a whole person, simultaneously the art and the artist. Constantly in a state of flux, but always being put together in new and different ways. Things may sometimes seem daunting; trying something new, making art, building a life, but I promise the elements are always there, waiting for you, halfway to existing, with some assembly required.