Trish Crapo
And In One Another
Click image to view And In One Another
These collages were originally part of a sketchbook project entitled & in one another, organized by artists Katherine Romansky and Eben Kling in 2010. The project had each participant purchase the same softcover, blank-paged Moleskine notebook and use it to respond to 60 daily prompts, ranging from fairly straightforward: “What I ate today,” or “Everyone’s got one,” to more open-ended, even mystical: “God,” “the inside of pain,” or “cat man staring.”
While most participants responded with sketches, as I asserted on my inner cover — in cut-out, glued-in words from magazines — I draw with scissors.
I found it exhilarating to make a collage every day for two months, starting from a prompt I had no control over. It was a call and response that connected me to other artists in my community and beyond. It also got me working more quickly, experimenting with layers and materials in new ways.
At the end of the project, Romansky and Kling held a reception and brief exhibit of the sketchbooks in Northampton, MA. The reception was part cocktail party, part bookstore browsing as people perused the various books, getting a glimpse into the amazing range and dexterity of the human imagination.
Trish Crapo
TRISH CRAPO is a writer, photographer and collage artist living in Western Massachusetts. She’s been an arts columnist for local newspapers, a fiction columnist for Women’s Review of Books, and written for Los Angeles Review of Books and Provincetown Arts. Her poems have appeared in Osiris, Southern Poetry Review, Meat for Tea, and in former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s nationally syndicated newspaper column, American Life in Poetry, among other places. Her chapbook, Walk through Paradise Backwards, was recently reissued by Slate Roof Press, and a poem sequence, adrift, a rowboat, was published by Open Field Press in November, 2021. Her photographs and collage have been exhibited at galleries in Vermont, on Newbury Street in Boston, at The New School in NYC, in Havana, Cuba, and, as part of The War & Peace Project, in Moscow and Tula, Russia. She is a founding member of the collaborative word/performance/art group Exploded View.