Urge to redo early works

In the past few weeks the amount of actual work on making paramontages has dropped and has been replaced by administration tasks as the Eastern Suburbs Art Group ramps up. This morning I made sure my records to help me find works were up to date, and at the same time I thought about how I’d given up manufacturing pieces on a grid, which was how the first ones had been structured.

Below is ‘Incipiens’, a paramontage using a sonnet written on 12 January 2014, 19 July 2020 and 15 May 2022, the last undertaking coinciding with when it was made. In fact most of the work was done eight years ago.

As usual I include indicators showing when work was actually performed partly because I keep this information for sonnets but also partly to illustrate how far I’ve moved since those early days of paramontage making. 

Below is a more recent one, ‘The trumpets, or, the constitutional rising of the 1820s’, which was written on 16, 17, 24 and 29 November, and 9 December, 2020; 9, 20 March and 15 September 2021. The actual work was on 27 May and on 12 July at which time I improved it.

The main benefit of the new method is that, relative to the images, the poem is larger, hopefully large enough to read when the framed item is hanging on a wall in a room. The type-6 (grid) method keeps the poem too small to read, so spoils the point of the whole assemblage, but I’m not quite sure how the type-2 method (used for ‘The trumpets’) reads from the room because I haven’t got any of this type framed and hung yet.

This explanation is a bit confusing, I’m aware, especially since I came up with the names for the different methods after I’d started on the path of paramontage. In actual fact type 6 comes chronologically before type 2. Apologies for the difficulty in understanding but I didn’t start to classify my works until I’d already been making them for quite a number of weeks, and when I did start classifying images I found I wanted to privilege the more favoured methods over the methods that had already been paused (though it’s possible that I might, in future, restart making type 6s).

At the time this blogpost was made type 2 was one of the dominant methods and indeed the last time I went to the print shop – yesterday – I dropped off files for two more type 2s.

This brings me back to the point I started off wanting to write about with this post, and that is the urge to redo type 6s as type 2s. I kind of like the grid layout but the fact that you can’t read the poem from the room bothers me a lot. What do you think I should do? Comments welcome.