COLLEEN MONETTE  |  ASSEMBLAGE

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I am a salvage artist. My style of collage, my aesthetic, is much like a historian or archaeologist, to preserve what I unearth. I love the ancient, I swoon over beautiful penmanship and old love letters. There’s a deep connection I feel to the past, to the person who penned the letter, the faces in a photograph, the beauty and the decay. There’s a sadness to it, they have been separated from their kin. I want to travel back in time, get to know them. Even in a simple old grocery list, I get a sense of who they were. Bits of ephemera, some centuries apart, are combined through folding, tearing, layering and peeling back, exposing an identity lost and creating a new history. To give them a further feeling of permanence and stop any decaying, encaustic medium (beeswax and damar resin) is added and unexpected details emerge. The ghostly images from the other side of the document will appear as the wax permeates the paper, in reverse, drawing me in. The Japanese word, mottainai, meaning ‘too good to waste,’ was used to describe boro fabric: textiles that have been mended and patched over and over. This resonates with me, so every scrap of antique paper or vintage fabric is saved until it finds a home in my art. I also feel the importance of using the original materials, not copies, to lend authenticity to myself and the voice I’m hoping to bring to the original owner of the document.

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http://www.colleenemonette.com

colleen.monette@yahoo.com               January Art Walk 2019