Introducing myself to Steemit.
After working with many traditional art modalities: drawing, painting, printmaking, collage, sculpture and photography ~ My art making is becoming more attuned now to nature, as I work with relatively small assemblages and arrangements built up from flowers, weeds and plants combined with other natural materials that I find in the local bushland or surrounding urban streets.
During the creation of my pieces ~ The process is all and incredibly magical. Thoughts of anything else are silenced.
I fall in love with the individual pieces of nature that I am using and then how the different elements greet, merge, compliment and/or contrast with each other.
Hundreds of photographs are taken at different stages, that can't possibly capture the beauty I see with my eyes or the feelings felt while adding and removing, arranging and rearranging components such as dried sticks covered with lichen, crystals and rocks, shells and seeds.
I see the images giving form to a new expression, that can be enhanced by ideas/thoughts/words that come to me, as I look at the image.
Words based on the actual image and the symbolism of the elements that have been used are manipulated, as a collage of words, into short 'poems.' Words are also based on what has been or is happening in my day/week/month/year/life, a quote I'm drawn to, a comment on a social network, a spoken word ~ Whatever I am sensitive to in my surroundings.
Sometimes the resulting 'poems' show me aspects of a piece that I couldn't see before. As do comments from other people ~ Who may see and add another layer from their own reality.
The Heart of Immortality.
Softly gaze into the depth of my heart:
I am fragile ~ Yet I am SO strong:
Delve deeper into your heart:
I will be with you there:
Forever ~ Forever.
~Ally.
Where there is love there is life. ~Mahatma Gandhi.
Ice assemblage and photograph: ©Alison Lee Cousland.