Bunker Down
Tirana, Albania. One of the postcards from my 2018 #91days project
My archive is growing. I’ve just finished my 2018 book of blogposts and collage postcards I made when we travelled for three months in 2018. I was re-reading the long post I wrote about borders, walls (and their crossing) which took me from Ohrid, Macedonia with its turreted ramparts of the Tsar’s fortress, to the bunkers constructed by Albania dictator Enver Hoxha.
This dome shaped collage was made on a postcard of Tirana, the capital of Albania illuminated by night. A semicircle of grey map paper with tourist highlights encircled and marked in red. Every time I see this postcard it takes me straight back to the Bunk’Art where one of the bunkers in the centre of the city had been turned into an underground museum documenting the horrific totalitarian regime that the country suffered under for forty years.
On the weekend I attended an art gathering where creative people from the northern rivers of NSW came together to look at ways art could catalyse change. It was remarked that art is healing, in the process of making something, we activate our creative spirit. Change comes from being present and imagining the future we want to see. We dream forwards.
It came to me that transforming a bunker into a museum that acknowledges the past atrocities of a forty years rule was one step towards healing. It helped acknowledge the past so that it could heal trauma and allow forward movement.
In my head I’m thinking already about next year, the type of impulse I want to carry forward into 2026. Overseas travel is not factored in as I want to stay put and be really present where I am. The more I read through my archives, the more I see there are so many possibilities to use what I already have ie materials, skills and interests to create with.
The world outside is turbulent. Our phones and internet connected devices overload us with sensations, information and cajoling, whispering that we lack the things necessary for a happy life. Persuading us into believing we need more of this or that when in fact we have everything we need within us waiting to be activated.
I’m feeling the need to ‘bunker down’, raise up the drawbridge, go deeper within so I can freely dream my future forward. I’m taking the pressure off, letting my hands reconnect with collage again as a way to engage my hands and heart, tearing up prints and papers and composing them into mini stories and anecdotes. I’ve been putting them onto my Instagram account @collagesquares which I may continue next year.
I look at these recent collages and know that they are the product of ten years of practice so that my hands automatically arrange and rearrange components into compositions I am pleased to share. The rewards of ‘bunkering down’ and getting on with life, uninterrupted.
Surfs Up - 10 x 10cm collage on canvas board
Yellow Moon - 10 x 10cm collage on canvas board
