Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence by Andrew Juniper. Wabi sabi, the quintessential Japanese design aesthetic, is quickly gaining popularity around the world, as evidenced by recent articles in Time, The Chicago Tribune and Kyoto Journal. Taken from the Japanese words wabi, which translates to less is more, and sabi, which means attentive melancholy, wabi sabi refers to an awareness of the transient nature of earthly things.
I’m exploring Japanese words and their meanings…
With this assignment I began researching collage artists, mostly female. Having never studied collage before, I was introduced to a whole new way of thinking and making that I hadn’t tried since childhood. I had never noticed collage or if it was present in exhibitions, had never looked closely.
Artists I came across were Hannah Hoch, Eileen Agar, Kara Walker, Wanchegi Moto, Nancy Spero and Sonia Delaunay. The latter I knew through her work in colours, shapes and fashion design.
I initially conducted research online, through my own general art books and then located books at Leeds Central Library, attached to the gallery. They have an art library. Accessing books is quite difficult at Foundations level as we don’t have an online resource to turn to. Art books are also notoriously costly. Leeds Art Library came to my rescue.
I took a morning to spend in the Leeds building and the opportunity to seek out collage in current exhibitions. In Abstracts in 1930’s Britain I found Frances Butterfield, Jacob Kramer, Cecil Stephenson, all of whom used collage as a means of expression.
I searched out Nancy Spero. She seemed to work in the moment and moved further away from Western art. She was known for her feminism. 
Hannah Hoch – Hannah took photos from other sources and made images from them, creating photo montages. Her lines are sharp and hard and she connected them through co
lour. She enjoyed playing with dimensions. This collage made me laugh when I first saw it! It’s a great example of humour through collage.
I then looked at Eileen Agar’s work. Her approach was to use mixed media, layering paint with collage. Her work reminds me of Matisse’s work – fluid shapes.
All three artists manipulate collage very differently, it was inspirational to discover them and research their work.
I chose Time for Tea but with coffee. I mixed words with found papers. It felt a little cheeky cutting up other people’s work, art postcards, brochures from creative writing courses and I have to say that initially I struggled with this, but these were the materials I had. I kept remembering Hoch and that working in collage in this way was fine, it did also lend itself to a rebellious approach to art. So much can be said with simple imagery.
The items were a coffee pot, small cup with saucer and shot glass. I also started a sketch book to formulate ideas around this theme, none of which I used, but I enjoyed researching and putting together. I kept what I made very simple, thinking more about shapes and sizes rather than colour initially. I had mostly white paper to work on but found a sheet of blue printing paper and a wax drawing in an A4 sketch pad, which I did some years ago. As they were together I decided to cut up my drawing to create a djezma on the blue sheet.
I wondered about the shapes I was cutting out or drawing and whether it mattered that they weren’t exact or that things fitted together properly. But there was also something enjoyable about the naivety in my work. I also wasn’t sure if I was interpreting the exercises properly, or if that really mattered either, if I was enjoying a process. Once I let go of the idea of perfection I started to have more fun in choosing from the selection of papers available in my home.
When it came down to working on A5, I suddenly felt that I could use the smaller papers and card to create an object in a more patterned, co-ordinated way, which I quite enjoyed the impact of.
For the last exercise on A5, stripes and spots, I worked on the theme of Italy from magazines. Cutting up photos of buildings, bottles of olive oil and Sofia Loren. It was enjoyable to take apart images and play with them. Interesting to note that it was very easy to tell what they were about originally.
My computer wouldn’t read the camera’s card after having taken photos of the work created. I also tried through another machine. I have been unable to upload them here as yet, but will keep trying.
Bibliography:
Agar,E. A Look at My Life, Methven, 1988
Hoch, H. Picture Book, Green Box Publishers, 1945
Spero, N. The Work by Christopher Lyon, Prestel, 2010
Taylor, B. Collage – The Making of Modern Art, Thames and Hudson, 2004
Again, for contemplation.
‘My life is a story of the self-realisation of the unconscious. Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and the experience itself as a whole. I cannot employ the language of science to trace this process of growth in myself, for I cannot experience myself as a scientific problem.
What we are to our inward vision and what we appear to be, can only be expressed by way of myth. Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science. Science works with concepts of averages which are far too general to do justice to the subjective variety of individual life….
We are a psychic process which we do not control, only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgement about ourselves or our lives. If we had, we would know everything – but at…
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