Exquisite Corpse On the Go

Sis has designed a project. She has launched a series of blank notebooks out into the world with directions on the covers. The idea is one person fills a page with their choice expression, a drawing, a list, a poem, a collage, or whatever and then passes the notebook onto someone else who fills in the next page. The above is my collage for her notebook. I simply collaged it with pictures from an old copy of New York magazine I found in her recycling bin. I had to keep the collage simple otherwise it'd never get it finished (like so much of the rest of my life). She's handed out upwards of 20 books. Granted, she gave a couple to me, one I could pass around my son's group of play mates that we hang out with in the park. She also gave my son Fyo his own book that he could do whatever he wanted with; he proceeded to glue many of the pages together. Whatever. It's his book. Which is precisely the point in a way, to discover new forms of self-expression or even to reconnect to old forms of self-expression. The other point is the sense of community that emerges as the books pass from person to the next and as one person picks up another's narrative thread. When the books all come back, around the end of November, there's to be a big party of celebration and exhibition.

I have a profound love of notebooks, their blank pages and their potential creativity, the promise of an empty afternoon spent delving into an empty page. It was a welcome invitation to receive, as it's been a long time since I've had a moment to settle down and set time aside to just hang out with an exacto knife and a glue stick and just let something emerge. But in this project, it's lovely to watch my little contribution emerge with a greater community's creativity. I've never gotten to participate in any kind of group art project before; notebooks are usual my private space or a space I hide out in. Yet this particular exercise was fun, as I couldn't get too attached to what I glued to the page. It's a new way to engage with the notebook process, by passing it on to it's next contributor - and it inspired me to dig out my old unfinished notebooks and create places I could escape to for a moment here and there.