New series. Eight collages. On flickr. In my etsy shop.

The 10th International Collage Exchange is now online at http://virtual.tart.co.nz/. Dale Copeland, the organizer and collage evangelist, puts and amazing amount of work into these exchanges. 159 artists, each sending in 13 collages, and somehow Dale keeps it all straight.

(Argh! I’ve been a terrible blogger! Family & day job stuff has been filling the parts of my brain that apparently I use to blog… Please accept my apologies!)

I spent the weekend working on a new print, Flight Plan. It’s a bit of digital + gocco fusion. The background beige image (which is a photo of an old, slightly yellowed, linen sheet) and the spatulas and button were printed digitally. Then the cicada was screened in green with my gocco. And the whatever-they-are diagram lines were also gocco printed. I think it’s a little weird and I like it. I post some bigger images and photos of the process on flickr.

New digital collage. As you’ve probably surmised, it’s an orchid with green toy race cars and a button thrown in for good measure. I’m enjoying the formal arrangement in this work and the cosmic rabbit gocco print (in my previous blog post). For a simple arrangement, I spent a surprising amount of time working on this. I had the orchid and green car images included from almost the beginning with various other elements– spoons, spatulas, other buttons, a rooster… After deciding that the orchid and green cars were strong candidates for the work, I realized my existing photos weren’t cutting it. So I took new photographs of them and I’m glad I did. I just got the orchid this past weekend and even with my black thumb, I haven’t killed it yet. Lucky. (I say that in my best Napoleon Dynamite voice. Sweet.) The toy car belonged to me as a child. I have several very cool metal toy cars. This one is a Dinky. Orchid with Green Racer No. 6 is available as an 11″ x 17″ print in my etsy shop.

birds & shibori #8Originally uploaded by triciamckellar

New digital collage! The Birds & Shibori series includes digitally altered photos of my hand-dyed shibori fabrics and photos of birds around my home in North Carolina.

I’ve been working on a new digital collage series– well, actually, several ideas for new series are stewing in my head at various stages, but I’m thinking of one in particular now. Each collage in the Plans & Diagrams series uses a photo of a linen sheet as the background image. I’m planning to do something similiar with this new series. The background images will be from a 19th century engineering book– here’s a tiny preview:

Yippee! A three day weekend! I’ve been photographing shells and working on a new series… just a few images are ready. They’re on flickr now; when I get the series more fleshed out, I’ll start adding the prints to my etsy shop. Life is good!

I’ve added a couple of new digital collages to etsy. Still enchanted with the luna moths and spatulas.

I’ve been accepted into trunkt! Trunkt is a buyer’s guide to independent Art + Design. I’m honored to be in the company of such talented artists, designers, craftsmen:

http://www.trunkt.org/triciamckellar

I’m thrilled to be invited to participate in this exhibition:

A Natural Order: Art Exploring the Organic & Artifice
Morehead State University
Morehead, Kentucky
August 29 - September 21, 2007

I’m sending 10 works from the Plans & Diagrams series. Thanks to Jennifer Reis, Gallery Director and the folks at Morehead State for this opportunity!

I’ve been working to get a lot of my prints on my etsy shop and get in tune with the etsy vibe:

http://triciamckellar.etsy.com

I am fascinated by natural patterns, divine systems, man’s machines, and the everyday junk all around us. Collected images of machines, insects, technical drawings, and kitschy junk form a soup of design and chance. My works often wrestle with a theme that returns to me over and over again; how does all the stuff of our lives fit together? Is it a neat equation? How do chance and chaos contribute to our circumstance? How do the organic and the digital coexist? Each collage is an exploration of another permutation, another tangle of objects.

Digital collages from my Plans & Diagrams series will be on display in the Artspace Lobby in June. Maybe it’s time to order frames :)

image: Plans & Diagrams #4

See more of this series

Another digital collage for the International Collage Exchange I spent the afternoon printing collages for the exchange on my new paper — the Arches Infinity with watercolor paper texture and they look GREAT! The paper is lovely and the images POP! I’m tickled pink… now to find the funds to order many more boxes of this paper in various sizes…