With old photograms and collages, when I finally decide they just don’t work, I cut them up into squares and play around with combinations. Which means that details created at quite different times, maybe years apart, can end up next to each other, as if that’s where they were meant to be all along.
A few days ago I came across this poem by the German poet Durs Grunbein (translated by Michael Hofmann)
‘Monological Poem #4
You pursue your own
eccentric designs you re-
fine the images you order
the moments but you don’t
listen to them
as quite differently in their own ways
they pursue their eccentric
designs refine
images show chance movements
move differently
in the same spaces and damned
if they’re going to listen to you. That
is the nub.’
It’s as if the squares had their own agenda, their own intentions. Which would be a foolish thing to suggest.
Dave Eva Photograms 