This project felt scary for two reasons
- I was stressed about using the whole book. There are SO MANY WORDS and to sort through them all felt overwhelming. To counteract the stress, I filtered my source down to only the passages the previous owner had highlighted. This way I also felt like I was collaborating with a stranger, which felt nice. The first passage I read was a conversation between a mother and a daughter. The collaboration and this initial passage both contributed greatly to the idea of my found poems focusing around communication and conversation.
- Self portraits are hard. The self is constantly in flux, plus I’m still an adolescent which comes with identity crisis upon identity crisis (but let’s be honest that’s just life sometimes). To be asked to create a body of work that represented me felt daunting until I let go of controlling what I told people. I stopped trying to tell a story or highlight an important aspect of me. Within the highlighted passages of the text, I just allowed words to speak to me. I think this method of piecing together a portrait proved itself successful because the words I naturally gravitated to and the things I created with them revealed a lot about the way I think and feel. Additionally, after choosing to focus on conversation, my partners in conversation chose themselves. Whoever I converse with in a given poem tells the reader about what takes up the most space in my life right now and the way I interact with these things.
Initially, I was intent on maintaining the state of the book, so I copied the words and phrases that spoke to me down on a separate piece of paper and created poems from whatever I had given myself. After a while, this felt too slow and contributed to the overwhelming prospect of sorting through as many words as possible, so I took a black sharpie, and later a ball point pen, to the pages of the book. I didn’t end up using any of the material from the black out pages, but it was definitely a different experience. I wasn’t able to go back and uncover words that I’d blacked out. It required much more commitment and adaptation. It was a good exercise for me in particular because I am 100% a perfectionist and I have been told since I was 3 that I need to let go a bit.
The presentation of my conversations was not super thought through. I just had a vision that I couldn’t get out of my head for whatever reason so I brought it to fruition. The crumpled paper is a texture I found in google images. I drew the text bubbles in illustrator, the text is a font I made out of my handwriting, and I used photoshop to create the effect of the illustrations conforming to the wrinkles of the paper.
