At the new moon last weekend I participated in a small group... thing. I'm not sure how to explain it. Anyway. The group was given "homework" and the homework was to create a collage on a particular theme, I honestly can't remember what it was. When it comes to art I don't really like being assigned themes or given any guidelines whatsoever, actually. But I do love collage and working on my style book for school (in the make up industry I guess they call style books 'morgue's so from here on I'll refer to mine this way, too, it's so clever) has me in the mood for paper and cutting and pasting and all that (I'll post some of my more recent pages soon, now that I've thought of it).
It took me a few days and I started out with a couple very simple collages, just pairing images together or  imposing one on the other, similar to what I've done in my morgue. I knew I wanted to start getting into more interesting compositions and the above is what I've come up with so far.
What I wanted to say most about them is that even though they are so obvious and the transition from one to the next is fully connected, when I started to choose images and work on these I really didn't have a clear idea of the theme I was working on I just saw images that I could do something with. The obvious outcome are illustrations of confinement, crystallization, awkwardness, fragementation and restriction. Struggling to emerge. Followed by synthesis, emergence, freedom, and wholeness. In the second one, I wove together an image of clouds taken from a plane and an image of the ground also taken from a plane. Coincidentally, the caption under the dancer was something to the effect of "I asked her to take something from the air and place it on the ground". My favorite thing about these pieces, again, is that I made them without thinking. Much as they are connected I didn't see anything until they were both completed. I like the idea that my subconscious is so sharp that I can go on autopilot and become more coherent than in I were making an actual effort.