Disintegration Revisited

Back in March I joined the Disintegration Collaboration group dreamed up by the wonderful mind of Seth Apter over at The Altered Page. Our mission was to create mixed-media bundles that could be left outside in the late winter weather to begin to degrade and disintegrate. To fall apart. To let time and the elements have their way with paper and string and thread and objects that made up our offerings.

Seth's idea was to make "bundles", but I, not always reading the directions correctly, chose to make hanging poem flags. Stitched together collage arrangments with the William Stafford poem, "You and Art", written on the back with Sumi ink*, tied to the limbs of the Hawthorne tree outside my studio window.

Two months later, after a veritable hurricane of high-plains, northern Colorado winds, some snow and a good lashing of rain…

…my poem flags have faded and muted in the most lovely of ways. Curling and wrapping themselves around tree limbs…

…the sitting buddah faded from grey stone to pale celadon, petals of the flowers behind curling inward.

I've now set them free from the wind swept alley and budding tree branches on the side of the house…

…brought them back into the studio to be reintegrated and reimagined into Part Two of the Disintegration Collaboration – new creations rising from the wind and weather worn poem flags. Stay tuned, in August my fellow collaborators and I will reveal how we have integrated these lovely, earth and weather worn bits into new works of art.

Rare beauty indeed and I believe that the "moss (does) redeem the stone."

*You and Art by William Stafford

Your exact errors make a music
that nobody hears.
Your straying feet find the great dance,
walking alone.
And you live on a world where stumbling
always leads home.

Year after year fits over your face—
when there was youth, your talent
was youth;
later, you find your way by touch
where moss redeems the stone;

and you discover where music begins
before it makes any sound,
far in the mountains where canyons go
still as the always-falling, ever-new flakes of snow.

10 thoughts on “Disintegration Revisited”

Fantastic! Can’t wait to bury some stuff…

lovely as is the poem. thanks for sharing the faded beauty. we in the east just dont have the kind of weather to do the job! that says something! lyle

Thanks for the poem! Don’t you love the way things curled, ever so gently? I’m already planning my next bundle. Buried somewhere with a “plant stake” stuck in the ground nearby. Nice photos. Now – what to do next?