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We're not done with the pandemic here in the U.S., so I made you some masks.

Collages have been one of my (too) many projects in the wings, and reading about Alexander von Humboldt this month finally pushed me to sit down and do the work of translating my ideas into images.

A Humboldt exhibit was supposed to open at the Smithsonian in March, and then... I settled for a book. The Invention of Nature describes how the Prussian scientist / philosopher's intellectual connections flowed into his notes:

"As he went along, he placed bits of paper on top of each other, some buried completely under the new layers, while others could be folded out from beneath. ... By the end the original paper was a many-layered bricolage of thoughts, numbers, quotes and notes."

French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described bricolage as an assembly of materials that "bears no relation...to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions."

Bricolage harbors more improv and less focused structure than collage. A quilt is the Platonic form of a bricolage in my mind. Early quilters worked when they could spare the time and sewed with scraps they saved.

The Kansas City Star began publishing quilt patterns during the Great Depression. Three decades and 1,000 designs later, the newspaper had delivered textile collage – quilts with intention, planning, and fewer strictures of frugality.

My masks are collages too – I set out with an objective and selected components accordingly. These newsletters start as bricolage and meander into collage by the time I sit down to write, a little like our hours and days.
 

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