Bruce Hartman
Transparent
2025
Analog Collage
Paper, book/magazine clippings, plastic sheeting, cellophane tape
17 x 11 inches
A collage artist I knew a few years ago laid up his work on a piece of expanded foam insulation (the green, blue, or pink stuff) with pins… sort of the way one might put stuff up on a bulletin board. Somehow, I forgot about this technique until just a couple days ago.
It has some advantages, but for the way I work, it seems to have more disadvantages. I’m finding the pieces don’t lay quite as flat when pinned, so trying to tack things together to transition them to my usual double-thick cardstock backers gets a little fiddly. This piece has a lot of bubbling and pucker in the tape lines. The result looks a little sloppier than I’m comfortable with.
The pieces also–obviously–end up with pin holes. I don’t mind them, necessarily. I’m leaning towards calling it a feature instead of a bug.
That’s coming from a guy who likes to include evidence and artifacts from the source material when I’m cutting, though. For instance, I intentionally leave page numbers on pieces that use in my work a lot. Sometimes the number means something, other times it’s more of an aesthetic choice (think, a beauty mark or a mole). I also like the nod back it gives to the source, a reminder that it’s repurposed.
I’ll experiment with pinning a bit more to see if it’ll work for me but I’m not very optimistic.