I was really fortunate to have the opportunity last Sunday to participate in workshop at the Eliot School entitled Collage: The Art of Collaboration. For those who may not have read the workshop description on our web site, this class was taught by members of Team Tolstoy, a group of artists who embarked, over a year ago, on a collaborative project creating collages out of every page of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It was inspiring to hear about this project, how it came to be; how each of the team members have approached this endeavor creatively, and how they have been impacted and influenced by the process. If you’d like to learn more about the “War and Peace Project”, including opportunities to view the project in person, visit Team Tolstoy’s blog.

There were 8 of us in Sunday’s workshop, including a couple of Eliot School instructors. We each came to class with varying levels of creative experience, but all of us with enthusiasm and curiosity about the process.

When I walked into the classroom I was immediately struck with a familiar sensation of delight and anticipation – the long wooden work table in the center of the room was heaped with with an intriguing assortment of supplies and ephemera: paints, glue, twine, stamps, scissors, pens and pencils of various sorts, and stacks upon stacks of magazines, books, plain and fancy papers, catalogs, and more. There is a childlike sense of play that comes with diving into a new stash of art supplies, and I had it in spades on Sunday. Propelled by the invitation to freely create with minimal restrictions, we all dove in head first and the tidy stacks of supplies were quickly transformed into a chaotic mass stretching from one end of the table to the other (a true indication of creative inspiration!).

Our instructors (Lynn, Emma, Lucy and Adrienne) explained our project for the afternoon: we would each be assigned a stanza from the poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens, and would interpret that stanza visually through our collages. The only rule was that at least some of the words of the poem be visible in our finished collage.

This experience was all about learning to manipulate a variety of materials, and exploring ways of translating the written word into visual expression. The experience was as challenging and as playful as each of us chose to make it. The opportunity to meet this wonderful group of women and work closely with them for 3 hours, to hear snippets their own life stories and bond with them over our group project really enriched the experience for me.

At the end of the class, we laid all of our collages out on the table in the order of our corresponding stanzas, and read the poem aloud. Viewed in this manner, it was fascinating to observe that we each approached the project from a different perspective and that while each individual collage was very different, they really came together to form a cohesive whole – an effective representation of this beautiful poem.

I walked out of the workshop on Sunday regretting that the time had passed so quickly, but also inspired to continue to explore this medium on my own, and so grateful to have had the time to spend with this amazing group of people. Thanks to the Eliot School, my classmates and Team Tolstoy!

~ Kelly Knight