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Jigsaw ATC Exhibitions/Workshops Stephanie
Hansen - Papier Mache
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"Moving" Collages
My sister, Hazel Jarvis, stood over the table which was strewn with bits of paper with black printing on them. This was no ordinary newspaper or other printed material but was the almost transparently thin rice paper covered with modern Japanese characters. Small black spider characters crawled vertically up and down the page or was it that some bird had left its black footprints in the snow of the page? There was an old book with different print - hirogana or kanji - on its pages together with line-drawn pictures of people in the upper margin. They were depictions of Noh actors and this was a script for a Noh play together with instructions to the actors. Its previous owner had pencilled in changes to some of the characters - different pronunciation or movements perhaps?
She frowned in concentration as she tore off sections of the printed page and carefully stuck them on to a sheet of heavyweight artist's paper. She already had a collection of watercolour paintings of broken bowls and pots and shards (inspired by the young industrial archaeologists, in the form of her 2 small boys, who had painstakingly collected pieces of pottery in the park on my visit to Japan 2 years ago, and by the 3 beautiful pottery fragments she herself had found and painted in watercolours). She had carefully cut these out and was now experimenting with positioning them on the printed background until she had a pleasing arrangement and then she glued them in place.
The collages had been inspired by the idea that you carefully wrap up a prized possession when you move house and then when you unwrap the newspaper in your new home the object is broken. She'd made a couple of collages as farewell gifts for friends of hers leaving Japan at the same time as herself and she had subsequently been commissioned to do some more. These were the first examples I had seen and I was impressed by the delicacy with which she had painted the pieces of the typically blue and white Japanese porcelain, heartbreaking in what they left said and unsaid of the transience of our fragmented lives.
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