#coronatessellations and #northsidetessellations.
During the 2020 Minnesota COVID19 lockdown I devised a virtual collage project anyone on social media could join. I could not have anticipated the response. Here’s how I stumbled upon a collective urge to collaborate, what that led to, and where it’s headed.
#coronatessellations: the first 324 submissions. 2020
In March of 2020 like so many others I found myself under a State COVID19 response lockdown of undetermined duration.
I had just come off a string of collaborations with students on group, Upcycled-object relief works as part of my ongoing series United Tessellations.
March 2020: Second graders at Northside Elementary in St. James MN displaying their contributions to United Tessellations just a week prior to the MN 2020 COVID19 lockdown.
I had actually just completed a making-session of components for United Tessellations with a group of 2nd Grade students at Northside Elementary in St. James MN. These proud, smiling students had no idea they would never get to see their creations hung together as a group. In two weeks MN would go into lockdown and I would be faced with a time of undetermined duration in which I would not be able to collaborate in my habitual way. Suddenly two of the aspects of United Tessellations that had been its strength—working in groups and sharing materials and tools—became liabilities. I had to begin to think about ways I could continue to collaborate and share my passions and concerns about post-consumer materials in a way that was still collaborative but also safely distant.
Visual instructions for #coronatessellations 2020
After some simple experimentation with used paper and my own vast stores of post-consumer objects, I settled on a simple square format—one that would mirror the grid structure of Instagram, in which collaborators could frame a sheet of used junk mail, office or copier paper that was folded, torn into a square and then oriented as a diamond shape. This became the ‘canvas’ (actually, any square surface or area could function as this blank slate) on which to arrange a simple 3D collage of found or collected objects—what I like to call ‘junk drawer media’—to then be photographed and shared to Instagram with the hashtag #coronatessellations”
#coronatessellations: examples of contributions and composite grids created in the Layout app. 2020
The responses were surprisingly immediate and plentiful. By the end of the first week almost 100 people had created a contribution. As people added the #coronatessellations hashtag the photos gathered under the hashtag heading to form a kind of 'virtual quilt’. I extended this process by organizing larger comprehensive and chronological grids using the Instagram compatible grid app Layout. I was overwhelmed with the ingenuity, creativity and conceptual variety people brought to this process, but even more so by the breadth of ages, experiences, geographies and cultures the process brought together.
#northsidetessellations: Visual Instructions. 2021.
Hearted by this process, I applied for and received both a Minnesota State Arts Board Creative Support for Individuals and a Prairie Lakes Regional Arts Council grant to continue to develop Social-media based group recycled collage projects. I devised a new iteration of the essential idea of #coronatessellations, slightly changing the format to allow for more variations of combinations of objects. The new format provided a four-part grid of triangular segments, that could be filled to form bow-tie or hour-glass shapes or even single, triple or quadruple combinations.
#northsidetessellations: Spring 2021 Second grade classes. 2021.
An inspiring and healing symmetry was achieved when I was able to approach the new 2nd grade classes at Northside Elementary in St. James and invite them to collaborate—with no fee—on this new online experiment. As anticipated, the students approached this process with an unmatched creative zeal. Northside had returned to in-person at this point (March of 2021), but this was still an ideal project for their circumstances, as students were still socially distant and several students and teachers had also opted for remote learning. The parameters of the new project made it possible for all students to collaborate safely.
David Hamlow is a fiscal year 2021 recipient of a Creative Support for Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts board, thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
This activity is also made possible in part by a grant from the Prairie Lakes Regional Arts Council with funds appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature from its general fund, and by a grant from the McKnight Foundation.