The Handmind's Tale
Collage by Helen Sword
This gorgeous collage, titled Blossom, was created at our free WriteSPACE birthday extravaganza on Valentine's Day by Nadia Dresscher, who teaches sociology at the University of Aruba and is finishing a PhD at the University of Amsterdam. In her WriteSPACE membership profile, Nadia wrote:
I lean towards ontologies that articulate the social as messy, as incomplete, entangled in assemblages of human and non-human actors in a constant flux of becoming; I love to experiment with methodologies that try to approximate the unfoldings of the self, the movements of the entanglements we are part of, and the changing structures of feelings. I also write poetry, and I'm in the process of experimenting with creative non-fiction, autoethnography, and short stories.
I love the way that Nadia's exuberant collage gives visual form to abstract ideas such as entangled assemblages, human and non-human actors, unfoldings of the self, and changing structures of feelings. Nothing in the human mind is fixed; everything is fluid and fecund and unfolding.
Author Ursula LeGuin reminds us that our hands help us think:
Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. (Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home)
Substitute "collage" for "clay," and LeGuin's words capture perfectly the power of collage-making to help us formulate ideas that we have not yet pressed into words.
One of my favorite warm-up tasks at our WriteSPACE Live Writing Studio involves asking participants to freewrite about a piece of visual art. Over the coming months, I will be putting that technique into practice myself, using some of the other beautiful collages produced by workshop participants on Valentine's Day to inspire the themes of future newsletter posts.
My head is already so full of ideas right now that I can practically feel the flowers blooming, the spirals unfurling, the mushrooms sprouting, the maps drawing themselves, the butterflies flying off the page. Thank you, Nadia, for the gift of your beautiful Blossom!
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