Developing a collage cartoon for a tapestry.

The approach I take is to create an evolving image where very little is resolved at the start. I have begun other work with this approach, where imagery is made up fresh every day and added to the work to create a larger piece. The work that I am referring to is a scroll like weaving that I have been working on for a very long time. With that piece, I decided that the background would be all tones of red, and the figures that were added daily would be superimposed upon it, this is ongoing and not part of my MA work. I found it an interesting way of building an image and decided to include it into this new work. The present collage has two methods unifying the image. The first way is that the entire background colour was drawn from a patched together collage of different greens. That patchwork of green was then be placed behind the warps whenever background is to be woven. The second unifying element is a continuous line of bunting flags. This created an atmosphere of a fair or carnival. I have collected characters from journals and paintings that incorporated into the collage. Other visual sources include images taken from books that are about the circus and performance. The small images have been manipulated on a photocopier to gain the correct scale, cut out and placed onto a large sheet of paper. When a pleasing composition is established the images were stuck down with tape. I tried to create a kind of narrative space. The work has an unusual and confusing sense of non-perspective. It can seem as though it is an aerial perspective because of the patches of colour; the figures within the tapestry confuse the scale and the spatial relationships. This had not been my conscious intent; although I knew something unpredictable would be the result. The bunting flags mentioned earlier also adds to the narrative, the flags wind up or down (depending on how one views the picture) compressing the perspective in a way that describes the narrative in a similar way to “Indian miniatures from Rajasthan”(49) are sometimes constructed. I am particularly fond of this style of composition, because I see relationships between medieval art and tapestry.