It’s Me, A Collage - ESSAY
I have always loved collages and mood boards. Over and over,
I have built up my world (my bedroom) with blue tack and
postcards/photos/artwork/magazine clippings/book pages, filling any space with
reminders of what I love and admire. Scrap-books and mood-boards give me the
freedom to create something out of other people’s more beautiful things, that I
collect, bit by bit, from important places. As what I care about changes, and
as I realise the naivety of my taste from two days ago, I can start from
scratch. I grow up, take my collages down and then the next day, re-make them.
When I studied Art, my favourite medium both to work with and
study from was mixed media. I was obsessed with artists like Sarah Fishburn and
the intelligence in her beautifully, purposefully cluttered images. I found
confidence in collaging, perhaps because I was able to hide behind the layers.
The thing about mixed media is that you aren’t being judged on just one thing –
your art consists of a thousand different considerations (and distractions from
your maybe sub-par painting skills).
But to me, everything I made seemed blatantly riddled with
indecision. A cluttered, archiving room let me like a thousand different
things, and while I never saw this as a fault (who could fault someone for
falling in love?), I felt frustrated with my lack of any distinct ‘taste’.
My sketchbooks always seem childishly choppy, dramatically
swinging from one aesthetic to the next, each time I looked at something new
and was respectively inspired by seemingly definitive
abstract/minimalist/scrapbook-y/expressive/modern styles. With clothes too, my
opinions hurtled round a revolving door. Drawn to a thousand different types of
outfit, I liked a mishmash of vintage/retro/tomboy/bohemian and drooled over
the possibilities of each costume. But in the end, my wardrobe always seemed to
end up looking like a jumble of Topshop sale items, my parent’s clothes and
ridiculously hard to wear items that were part of a specific aesthetic I had
completely WORSHIPPED for one July and then left behind. I remember reading an
article in a LOOK magazine when I was twelve called ‘The 10 Socially-Acceptable
Summer Styles That You MUST Chose From To Be This Summer’ (or something like
that) and trying really incredibly hard to pick mine. Spoiler alert: I settled
on ‘Sports Luxe’, studied the information I was given, failed to find anything
in town that Saturday that fitted the description and ended up buying the next
best thing in Primark: some bright orangey-red cotton leggings that I have
never in my life worn or even considered being seen in.
I knew this was part of the teenage existence: phases aren’t
anything unique. But I felt an unease, surviving on other people’s voices. My universe
was made up of bits of things I’d watched or read or noticed, and over the
years had started to resemble a Clarice Bean scene. I kept pages from an
interview with a calm and collected Dakota Fanning, stuck up photos on my desk
of Alice Walker meditating, made notes of lyrics from Lorelai Gilmore’s
favourite songs – in short, I surrounded myself with coded reminders of what I
wanted to be like. That is how I have always managed, since I can remember: by
copying other people. Watching how they look/behave/talk/move/dance and trying
to replicate that. My life was made up of scraps of things that other people
had done better.
These thoughts have been trying to articulate themselves my
whole life. And then, one day, I read Caitlin Moran and realised that she had,
essentially, beaten me to it (although to be fair she has had more years on
this earth and the incredibly privileged perspective of having FINSIHED
TEENAGEDOM ALREADY). I’m going to quote from her book How to Build A Girl. I say ‘quote’, but essentially what I’m doing
is lifting bits from an entire passage, because NOTHING HAS EVER RESONATED WITH
ME SO PERSONALLY. (Side note: while I was searching for this bit of the book, I
found many other examples of her genius that I had forgotten about and I think
maybe I will write an entire blog post on Caitlin at some point. She is one of
those writers I can honestly accredit with having rescued me.)
“You go out into
your world and try and find the things that will be useful to you. Your
weapons. Your tools. Your charms. You find a record, or a poem, or a picture of
a girl that you pin to the wall and go, "Her. I'll try and be her. I'll
try and be her - but here." You observe the way others walk, and talk, and
you steal little bits of them - you collage yourself out of whatever you can
get your hands on. You rifle through books and watch films and sit in front of
the television, trying to guess which of these things that you are watching you
will need when you get out there. What will be useful. What will be,
eventually, you?”
For me, this is what life has felt like so far. Almost to
a T. Which is – in a heart-wrenching, mind-fogging, maddening way – quite
ironic. Even copying from other people is an experience identical to other
people’s. And (even more ironic) in
trying to write about this, I have had to quote someone else, to explain it
better. In the most melodramatic metaphor of 2018, I’m like the philosophical
calculator (you know: if you replace each part of a calculator is it still the
same calculator?) that has been made up of so many other things it has lost any
kind of inherent self.
A collage, a scrap-book, a cluttered collection of other
people’s images looks a lot like being a teenager feels. For years, I have
played at how other people live, knowing that it will be a thousand times more
right than anything I could have thought of. The thing is, I don’t have
anything else. I can only build myself out of other things.