The Last Hurrah

For the past three years I've participated in The International Collage Exhibit and Exchange, formerly known as Baker's Dozen, run by Dale Copeland of New Zealand. The concept is simple; you make 13 collages and send them to Dale. One is exhibited physically and is for sale online, one joins a permanent collection (the host museum varies from year to year), and the rest are exchanged with the other participating artists.

The majority of the works are not fiber, but it seems to me more fiber artists participate each year. I've received some wonderful works in the exchanges, and have had a lot of fun with the project. I started working on the 2008 exchange late last fall, when I made a set of heliographic prints I'm calling The Last Hurrah. This is a multipurpose label; I picked the leaves at the end of Indian Summer, with winter knocking at the door, but I was also thinking about the political and environmental climate. I'm hoping it's the last hurrah for the former, and not for the later.

All of my previous collages have dealt loosely with my personal environment and global warming. You can see them at my site, suereno.com, under Collages.

The image above shows some of the prints drying in the sun. The leaves in these are plume poppy and white mulberry, two of my favorites. The colors are very bright, almost garish, but this is just a starting point. Today I got out the prints and started stitching around the leaf shapes. I'm still contemplating what else I will do in their transformation from cloth to finished collage.