This is one of a series of works created using some old sheet music.
It’s called WWJD for What would Julie do. It’s a reference to Julie Bookless, who was an exceptional artist. She made beautiful books, often all in white, and died too soon, just as we were doing the Sydney BAG show Replay.
I felt quite angsty while making this. It has taken me maybe 6 weeks with lots of time in between to dry layers and think what I’m doing with them.
I’m currently taking some meds which make me nervy, I fretted about how to back this piece. Then I asked myself what would Julie do, and the answer was white, so you will find that WWJD has white wallpaper front and back covers, from a stash I bought at reverse garbage maybe a year ago. the patterns caused by the layering (outlined below) just got too complex with a more complex background. This was not the first cover I tried, but it seems to be the last!
In fact I made the cover of Mary Contrary first to hold the bigger swing tag shapes that live in WWJD, and then repurposed it when it clearly wasn’t what I wanted.
The weird thing is that as I was drying out the cricut-cut pieces, I laid them out as you see in the images below, and they looked so good. In the end of this I returned to that image in my mind, and made Sailing by and Where have you been? and then some more collage. All of this happened in a 3 hour period, after much despair and getting half way through WWJD and not liking what I was doing.
Here’s what I did to the pages. There were layers of:
- monoprint from gelli plate (not on all the pages)
- tissue paper – most successfully the ones from clothing retailers with their logos and advertising strap lines (e.g. Andiamo), less successfully sewing patterns (which have been my go to for more than 25 years, so go figure)
- oil pastel/crayon (on some pages)
- Gansai Tambi watercolours
- Sharpie (if it was looking too dark or too dirty).
It’s interesting because the sharpie worked so well on the Night and Home, but just didn’t pick up the brightness or contrast in this piece at all. It kinda made things seem dull. So that’s something i learnt – what works on kraft paper doesn’t necessarily work on old sheet music. I realise as I’m writing this that I could add in some white / bright / gold, so it is not over yet perhaps?
The old sheet music was an Oxford Nursery Song Book (this link is to a newer edition). It had been my mother’s when she taught infants school, and she probably bought it in the 1960s. Since so many songs are available on the internet now i have begun incorporating them into my works, which i love, but the issue is that old paper just isn’t robust. I found with the 100 year old books retrieved from a dumpster in Chicago in 2016 to make Isadora, Saturday in the park: a post-card experiment and some others which i cannot now find. So i have vowed then to not use old paper. But this was a lovely colour, and i thought by layering i would be reinforcing it, which turned out to be kind of true.
I made some swing tag shaped objects from the layered paper. I cut some small ones, and later bigger ones. I wanted to make a flag book that allowed the viewer to move the flags around. The small tags are now in Mary Contrary, just nestled in pockets because they were single layer, and too flimsy. This piece holds larger flags, but they won’t work for the repositionable flag book idea. They work fine glued down (if a little large).
There is still an idea there, and I realise that it will be smarter to make narrower flags and wider pockets to make this idea work. I’ve not yet seen the idea in practice, and it may turn out to be just not practical. The pockets need to be tight enough to hold the inserts, but loose enough for the viewer to reposition them, and also wide enough to take 3 or more flags.
