Unselfconscious Wings

A friend of mine is undergoing a tough time, but is breaking out of a shell in the process. When I encouraged her to keep spreading her "new, unselfconscious wings," and then started taking collage requests in our online group, she wrote:

Your note gave me an idea for a collage theme: Unselfconscious Wings (preferably, with some purple!)

I'll see what she thinks of this one....

The wings are altered repetitions of a paper pulp leaf I made several years ago. The rest of the figure combines elements from five pictures. Three are of me: the head and bust come from a shot taken when I was 20, and my arm and legs come from recent (cough) nude studies I did with the digital camera, pointing it at my mirrored reflection. Since my eyes squint in the older photo, I substituted them with Red's. The headdress is made from altered repetitions of the "hair" from my Fortune Teller figure.

The road is located in the Australian outback. The buildings combine four cities: Manhattan (on the left); Sydney (the pink building in the foreground right); Cambridge, MA (the cone-topped cylinder just behind the pink building); and Florence (including the Duomo). The clouds are a recent photo. The inner gold border is taken from my former, now Mobius-strip wedding band. The outer border is from scanned (and originally darker) fabric.

The anthology I'm producing (to answer Colleen's question) is the annual Florida State Poets Association anthology, which marks its 23rd volume this year. This is the third year I'm producing it but the first in which I've also edited the material. Each FSPA member can have a poem in the book, so I've been trying to get as broad a representation as possible. In that way it forms a kind of snapshot of the organization.

My mother's poetry had appeared in Anthology One, so that makes the experience a cool full-circle one for me. Anthology Twenty-Three will be the third volume in which my poetry appears, but the first in which Mary also has a poem.

Now that I've scanned hundreds of photos (with many more to go!), I'm welcoming any collage requests according to theme, color, etc. I'll see what I can improvise with the components on hand as I take breaks from my transcribing.

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