ErikaMoen
patreon
PROJECT: What She Knows
🕑 Added 2023-08-19 22:53:10 +0000 UTCMy brilliant, beautiful, bootylicious friend Lucy Bellwood is running a kind of workshop (although she does not call it that) which centers on answering a question about your core beliefs and senses over the course of 100 days. It is called What She Knows. (Enrollment for this non-class is already closed, but you can still create your own answers to her daily prompts!)
Once again, I return to collage as my medium of choice for this project. It enables me to be a lot more creative with my responses than I would be if I were drawing because it forces me to explore images that I wouldn't have necessarily thought of on my own. When I draw, I am transcribing an image I have already imagined. When I collage, however, I am searching through pre-existing images to find the pictures that most feel like the written answer to the prompt, and sometimes (a lot of the times) that leads me to discovering visuals that are outside the ones in my established mental library.
Now, on to What She's Made for What She Knows!
1. I'm Trying to get back to...
I'm trying to get back to making, nurturing, growing, connecting.
There's two places I find it most distinctly: Working in my garden and making art.
The baby plants in this collage represent growing and nurturing (kind of on-the-nose symbology there) and the hands weaving the basket show the act of making and connecting.
I love the visual of all these reeds being joined together, like a friendly spiderweb, all these different strands being woven into each other to create this one whole container. That's my image for connecting with other people, we're all these separate pieces being connected with each other, joining together to become something bigger that holds us all together.
The phrase "I'm trying to get back to..." can imply that I am no longer in that place, or that I used to occupy that space and I no longer do. This is not how I feel about my Making-Connecting* space.
*(Shortening "making, nurturing, growing, connecting" to just "Making-Connecting")
Rather, it's like that Making-Connecting space is (almost) always accessible and within reach, I'm not cut off from it (usually) or lost from it (unless I'm really mentally unwell. That's my final caveat in this explanation!) and desperately trying to find my way back.
The Making-Connecting space is like a room in my house. I go in the room when I have reason to be there (Like, it's time to work on a project or catch up with a friend), and then the rest of the time I'm in the rest of my house doing all the other things one does in their home like chores and working and dicking around on Instagram while cocooned in blankets on the couch.
I'm not lost or cut off from my Making-Connecting space, but I also don't/can't just live in that space all the time, either. It is a place I have to make an effort to visit, though. I rarely just find myself in there without intentionally making the effort to make it happen (from having a project to work on or a date set with a friend).
Rather than "I am trying to get back to" I see it more as "I am making a continual effort to visit" my Making-Connecting space.
Comments
Erika Moen
💯
Erika Moen
Love how you phrased this. Yes yes yes.
Sharon Hughes
That analysis of "trying to get back to" really resonates with me. I've definitely felt that phrase makes you think of "the thing" as lost or degraded, as if it were static, but this reframes it in a way that "the thing" is constantly evolving and having potential so you don't end up feeling like you're struggling to return to some past state. Love it ❤️
Chelsea Watson
I really like the reframing of 'I'm making a continual effort to visit'. I notice sometimes a big push for a new habit feels more exciting and shiny than working to maintain existing quality habits, which can be equally important. ♥
