Impermanence, Sort Of

I have made several collages that are made permanent only in photos, such as this one. I assemble the scraps but do not glue anything to anything. The paradox of assembling images in whole that remains unglued and can fall apart at any moment is thrilling, intoxicating. Controlled chaos at its finest, with the knowledge that chaos will win. And of course, I cheat by taking a photo, so in a sense it is permanent, as permanent as anything digital can be.

What do I discover as I go through this process? First, that it is the process itself that I love: the tearing of scraps; the finding of already-torn scraps in my box of scraps; the way-leads-on-to-way of it all. Then there's the freedom of it: I can arrange the pieces without having to worry about the logic of gluing something under one piece but atop another. So many of the collages I glue into permanence are not quite what I intended, because the logic of sequencing the pieces sometimes defies me.

What I haven't done yet, but may try soon, is using the exact same pieces to make a different collage, a series of collages all with the same elements...

Permanent impermanence, repeating itself again and again.