A place in the square

Jordyn Bonds

Interview by L. Valena

If you could start by just explaining what you responded to.

I responded to what appeared to be a snippet of poetry or prose. It was not formatted in a typical poetry format.

What was your first reaction to it?

I got the email, and didn't really have time to work on it until like the day before the deadline. I purposely did not look at the prompt until the day I sat down to work on it, because I wanted my reaction to be spontaneous and fresh. So I printed it out without reading it, and sat down at the table where I do my collage work at, and read through it. Really I just read through it twice, and tried not to think too hard about it.

I'm a very analytical, linear thinker in general, and I go to collage to exercise the opposite part of my brain. I put a lot of boundaries on my collage work- I try to make it intellectually unstructured. I try to keep my prefrontal cortex out of it as much as I possibly can. I read through the prompt a couple times, and then immediately turned to my flat files, went through images, and pulled out anything that resonated.

That word ‘resonated’ is an interesting one in my case. I find that often my collage work has a kind of contrast feeling to it, which maybe is a hallmark of collage in general- I don't know. I only know what my vibe is with it. So the initial set of images I came across very much felt like the prompt. Once there was a vibe established, I noticed myself picking images that exactly countered that vibe, which is I think a pretty typical aspect of my process. P.S. this process with my work was not something I had delineated until doing this. All the things I'm saying to you are things I learned about myself while I was doing this.

Oh yeah- that's how this is for a lot of people doing this. Don't feel self conscious about that.

I think my conception of people who self-identify as artists more than I do, because they write artist statements and maybe went to art school, they may have a more well-articulated idea of what it is they're up to. If I had responded to this with a piece of music, I might have a different attitude, because my work with music is more well-trod for me, emotionally.

So I just started throwing images together. It feels a little bit like panning for gold- just sifting through things. Some things rise to the top, and certain things are immediately "no, not that". Until I'm on the other side of it, I don't have a good sense of why one thing is resonating and not something else. So I got an initial set of images together. It's almost always too many images- I'm never going to use them all. And then I decided it was a good moment to revisit the prompt. At various points in working on it I revisited the prompt. It helped me re-frame which of the images were going to work and which ones were not. And then there's also, outside of responding to the prompt, there's also this sort of... I get kind of a concept for the structure. How big is going to be? What is the base? Is there going to be a frame? Is it going to go edge to edge? One background? Multiple backgrounds? That's usually the initial thing to come together.

In this case, because the action of the prompt seemed to take place inside of a square, I immediately thought the piece needed to be square. And maybe it needed to be nested squares, because the prompt had a very claustrophobic vibe to it. So once that frame was established, every image I grabbed had to also fit within the frame I had set up. So there were certain images that I maybe wanted to use. They resonated thematically, but not structurally- I couldn't make them work with the shape or colors I was working with. There were some moments like that, that I tried to document. Moments where I felt like an image really worked, but I just couldn't shoehorn it in, structurally.

Can you say more about the vibe that you got from the piece, and what, in turn, you were trying to communicate here?

I really got like a very bleak, negative vibe. In an introspective, bleak way. A sense of loss, maybe abandonment or rejection. A sense of a relationship that ended, or ended badly. Also, a sense of industrialism. Like being trapped in a post-industrial wasteland landscape. But in a relational sense. So I kind of went initially for images that reflected that. Darkness, or almost a violence- but a violence that happened in the past. Not active violence, but cooling violence, almost. For me, the process of collage is a process of working through that initial vibe. Very quickly I established a collection of more dark, brooding, claustrophobic images and then immediately started moving through them with images that interacted with that initial space. Some of them just bearing witness. For a while I had this grey cat sitting in the upper corner, just kind of presiding over the piece. It had a feeling of a detached witness of the whole thing. Then there's the image of the guy with the VR headset on, which to me is a person who is just really in the throws of being extremely seduced by their own projections. Really inside of their own conception of the thing, which is absolutely how the prompt feels to me. It feels like someone right at the moment of a thing ending, and ending badly, and their feelings being very defined by that context, with no perspective on it at all.

That's really interesting, because one motif I see here is a lot of grasping, and reaching.

And touching, right? And the prompt included the word 'touch', and images around touch. Some words around two things coming into contact. So the guy with the VR set really felt like someone who thinks that they're grappling with something real, but they're actually just grappling with their own internal world. That definitely felt like part of the prompt. The cat disappeared because I started to feel like... there was this main image of the core struggle. The image of the swimmer grabbing the other swimmer by the ankles, and this background of a really intense but also kind of grey... the background is really intense. But that is the basic core of the dynamic for me of the prompt. And then everything around it is kind of the narrator moving through stages of processing it. And the cat wasn't that character- the cat was this outside character looking in, and that didn't fit. I think very early on, I had this picture of this hand, this drawing of a palm. But that hand felt way too open.

This is so funny thinking about this, kind of narrating it- the things you don't really realize you were thinking. I'm finding it kind of interesting to think about why I rejected some of these images. The hand with the thing written on it felt too optimistic and faced the viewer too much. The prompt really felt like something that was happening inside of the narrator. It isn't really about the audience. That hand turned toward the audience felt way too confrontational with the audience. There's also this bed, with this couple sitting on it, talking. That felt a little too on the nose to me. What was really fascinating to me was the little girl with the sparkly dress and tiara. I feel like she really defines the other end of this process. The square background, and the grasping swimmer, are the start of the internal process of dealing with a relationship loss. The little girl is almost like the resolution. I didn't know that at the time, but I had those images at the outset, and everything else was just filling in the blanks between those two things.

So there's a narrative in this piece- a beginning, middle and end.

Yeah. Which I didn't necessarily feel when I was doing it, but once I had settled on how it was going to look. And it feels like a spiral- it feels like you start out in the background with the swimmer, and then you spiral clockwise and forward toward the viewer, and settle in the lower right on the girl. She's basically optimistic, but also holding death with her arm. And I love this, because she seems so innocent, but she's super wise. If you can maintain your own innocence inside of it, a hard won wisdom is the best outcome.

Do you have any advice for someone else doing this?

No. I pointedly do not. I feel like it's really important to approach the prompt and process with you own self and your own process.

Well, that's good advice in itself. Is there anything I didn't ask you about you want to talk about?

I definitely wonder how someone else will react to this. And that was in the back of my mind a little bit while I was working on it, but I tried really hard not to think about it too much, because I thought it could cause me to make some crappy decisions. I kind of hope that my piece, as a transition from what I responded to, to the next piece, is able to transmute the negativity I got in the prompt into something maybe more humorous or optimistic for the next person.

Like lessening the blow?

No, not lessening the blow. Almost transforming it- making lemonade out of lemons for someone. So they get to have a glass of lemonade. Not that I was bummed to have lemons- because I was psyched on the prompt. But I'm also psyched to be handing something that feels more like lemonade to the next person. But I'm curious to see if they respond to the core darkness.

Call Number: C31PP | C33VA.boA

Jordyn Bonds was born in North Dakota and has been collaging since high school.  She also makes music, software, and tea (in ascending order of quantity). She has very little formal training in anything herself, but values and admires the studied expertise of others.