Visible Mending
Artist
My work is often influenced by loss and grief. Tracing the holes and fractures of my past and present has informed the way I approach art: to bring light to darkness.
Lately, mending has acquired more significance for me. While, in a simple sense, it allows me to put back together what has been broken, on a deeper level it affords the possibility of acknowledging the crack and turning it into something whole and new and visible. In this process, the mend is a work of art in and of itself.
Logaine Navascues is a Peruvian artist, writer and book maker living in the ancestral and unceded territories of the Semiahmoo and Coast Sailish Peoples in current day White Rock, BC. Her work focuses on the interplay between words and images. She holds an MA in Children’s Literature from UBC, and is the author of three artist's books that challenge traditional ways of reading and writing. Logaine loves to experiment with form and content, and to share her passion for stories and books through workshops with children, teens and adults.
Logaine Navascues
Find a broken object and mend it.
Invitation
Find an object that is broken: a bag, a plate, a photo, a trinket, a sock, a shoe. Big or small, anything works.
Make a list of the object’s characteristics: volume, size, texture, color, shape, pattern, weight, smell; any feature you can think of. Then, write the opposite of each characteristic (i.e. shiny = dull, flat / soft = hard, rough).
Put your hands to work: mend the object using unconventional materials. As you’re working, take mental note of the ideas, emotions, sensations, reactions, memories that arise during the process: What does it mean to break, to mend? Can you relate this process to a natural cycle or element? Can you relate it to human practices, rituals or artifacts? Can you think of it in terms of past, present and future?
Integrate the words or phrases to the mended object by writing, drawing, painting, embroidering, using cut-outs from books or magazines, etc.. Use whatever materials you need to make the object feel whole again.
Give your work a title.