Tuesday 8 June 2010

Cold comfort collage

I was browsing earlier and was looking at a site containing instructions for making collage.

It's all good, easy-to-comprehend stuff - ideal for using as reference, say, as a basic teaching aid. User-friendly, easy to follow, broken down into logical steps and so on and so forth. It has separate sections - following on from the method - with extra tips, precautions, and other extra bits and bobs.

Things take a surprisingly dark turn when you reach the section giving links to related topics.
The first link is How to make a digital photo collage, and the next three links are along broadly similar lines.

Then we get to the last one:

How to comfort the dying.

Clearly, the art of collage is far more multilayered these days than it ever used to be. Is it a metaphor? The glue being that which binds body and soul as represented by the flat surface juxtaposed against the illusion of depth (just off the top of my head)?

Or has there been a poll or survey, perchance, the result of which states that Dying people find collage more comforting than previously thought?

Or should one cut out a series of shapes and colours to stick down on a piece of board which, when held at a distance of a few feet, is then seen to show a sympathetic message?

I think we should be told.

10 comments:

Reading the Signs said...

Please keep us informed about this, Trousers, for who knows when the grim reaper may point his finger. And collage may be just the thing.

Fire Byrd said...

Fantastic stuff.
Good to know that art is so well intermingled with bereavement therapy.....
xx
Ps What did it really say? Cause your ability to read the signs is such an off the wall thing for me I can never fathom them out.

trousers said...

Will do, Signs, will do. I may also have to take note of whether certain kind of collages - cubist ones, for example - may have particular comforting properties (for example, just being there), whereas, say, John Heartfield's political satires may be the equivalent of a soothing voice or cooling hand on the brow.

FB, no, it really does say How to comfort the dying. Seriously. Follow the link I posted in the first sentence and check the article's own links section. x

sinister welder said...

Sorted.
I've been on the site, followed the instructions and constructed an origami coffin. Now point me in the direction of someone teetering on the brink and i'll be there in a trice.

trousers said...

Bloody hell x 2, Welder - firstly at the fact that you've reappeared after 3 years of silence (hello!), and secondly because you've been onto a collage site and somehow ended up doing origami!

Once a welder, always a welder..

Sinister Welder said...

You're quite right to be surprised trousers.
3 years.
Many sheds visited in the dead of night.
A myriad arc-light flashes.
Scores of gleaming new welded shed-sculptures.
My work is done...for now.
I will try to be a more attentive visitor to the blogosphere from now on.

BTW I now have a Rauschenbergian Headstone assemblage to accompany said coffin.

Chin Chin.

Zhoen said...

Bizarre. I've never felt any comfort from collage. College, yes, occasionally, but never collage.

trousers said...

Weldy, it all makes sense now, your Shedness..

Well no, it doesn't. I've only seen perhaps 4 or 5 arc-lite flashes, which doesn't constitute a myriad. But then maybe I was looking in the wrong direction.

Like I say, it all makes sense.

Zhoen, is that only because you didn't know of this link between collage and comfort (just like the rest of us up until this point, I suspect)?

Carol said...

Erm, I don't really know what to say about that...

*goes off slightly more confused than she was when she arrived*

C x

trousers said...

*goes off slightly more confused than she was when she arrived*

What that means, Carol, is - my work is done :)