Each year the National Collage Society holds a small format members’ exhibition. Since the the exhibit of eighty-six 4 by 6 inch works was held at Summit ArtSpace in Akron, I made a point of going to it. At first it seemed out of scale to walk into a large room with one horizontal line of very small works on three walls, but you forgot that once you drew closer to the pieces. I was amazed at the detail the artists packed into such small real estate.
While almost all the works merited close examination, here are the ones that really caught my eye.
Speaking for myself, it’s much easier to work at small scale with paper than with fabric, unless you’re only fusing. And that’s essentially collage with fabric. Now, that’s a thought – a paper-fabric collage using Mistyfuse. I’m sure many have already tried that, but it’s a new idea to me. I certainly have plenty of paper and fabric scraps to use.
I’m linking to Off The Wall Fridays.
The Snarky Quilter 
Interesting compositions! Thanks for sharing, Joanna. I very much enjoy seeing the range of ideas and vision in a multi-artist exhibition. So much inspiration … and, with luck, plenty of time to play!
The joy of a multi-artist show is the diversity of approaches. In this show the only two common denominators were technique and size.
That must have been great to see all of the entries. Thanks for sharing these, they are wonderful compositions and very inspiring. Oh, if only the woven fabric could tear like paper!
I so agree about how nice it would be to have that flexibility with fabric. The only way I know to tear fabric is the cut and pull to rip it into smaller pieces. That doesn’t do it for a designed piece.
I think the only downside of using Mistyfuse in a paper collage is that you cannot tear an edge once it’s fused. But I suppose you could tear the paper first and then fuse close to the torn edges. I don’t know, it’s been too long since I attempted it! That collage show revealed so many interesting ways of exploring the medium, for sure!
I suppose I could run experiments with various fusibles to see if some would let you tear an edge. I just tried to tear tearaway stabilizer backed with Heat and Bond and was able to tear it easily, so it may come down to the type of paper used.