collaborations

Today, with the snow, rain and ice settling into my body in a most unfriendly fashion, I'm skipping creating and thought I'd share another oldie but goodie!  It was a collaborative project, instigated by my friend and fellow artist Jennifer, over at reminders2bepresent.

We hadn't known each other long before she asked me if I'd like to work on a book collaboration with her.  She'd done several with other artists, and had amazing samples to inspire me into an immediate YES!!!

 

The idea was we each make our own books, with the same amount of pages, and the same dimensions.

She made an accordion book, while I bound mine more traditionally.  She used a black board for her pages, I used book board, which I paper machéd and gessoed.  

Once made, we each worked on three pages in our own book, then we traded,

worked over those three pages that had been started, and started on three new ones...

switched, worked over those three the other had started, started three new ones, etc -

 

back and forth, sometimes going over pages several times, setting no restrictions on when a page was *done*.

The beauty of this process, is the whole letting go - 

letting go of feeling your own work is too precious to be worked over; letting go of it going in a direction that wasn't the one you intended; letting go of something you thought was great being covered up.  

Lessons in impermanence, 

on trusting the process, and just getting to play!

I only have one shot of Jennifer's, seen here...

I'm currently working on my sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project, which is more about art and community participation, than collaboration as I've described it above - and on a huge scale, with more than 2,700 signed up to participate.  I plan to share more of that in upcoming days.

Many in the blogging community are active in some fabulous collaborative and interactive projects that demonstrate the beauty of creativity and community.  A few include Seth at The Altered Page, where he has invited fellow bloggers to create and record their own Disintegration process through a sort of nature performance art.  He is also in a round robin collaborative book project, at Inner Works, along with fellow blogger artists Veronica Funk, Roxanne Evans-Stout, Jill Zaheer, Supria Karmakar, and Rita Vindedzis.  Many of you are out there knitting up a storm to warm up light posts, trees, and telephone poles - thanks to grrl + DOG and her Global Guerrilla Knit up Challenge!  I'm inspired by each of these projects - are you involved in any?  

I'm excited to be starting a similar book exchange project with Lynne Hoppe soon.  We'll share our progress as we get going on it!

To see these photos more closely go to my photo album,

for some reason, blogger didn't let them link to show a close up - 

may be too many photos in one post!