Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You by Will Aitken

Will Aitken is a Montreal artist and writer who works in collage using Japanese chiyogami decorative paper, laser-printed images and text. He is new to the medium and to art-making in general, having picked up his scissors in 2020. As a writer he has published four novels - The Swells, Realia, A Visit Home and Terre Haute - and two non-fiction works - Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo van Hove and the Art of Resistance and Death in Venice: A Queer Film Classic.

Discover Will Aitken's series, The Albatross

View PIVOT, a video collage created by Will Aitken describing his art practice.

"Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You"

This piece shows Alice Munro at the apex of her power. I set out to build a tower of Babel to show how her magic would disintegrate overnight and her books disappear across the world but ended up with what settlers call a totem pole and what indigenous tribes in the Pacific Northwest variously refer to as a spirit pole, a heraldic pole, a monumental pole, a clan totem or, if perhaps referring specifically to what I’ve created here, a spiritual void.

The collage’s background constitutes a re-imagining an Emily Carr forest-scape called "Blue Sky" (1936). I flipped it horizontally, moving the large shrub from left to right and the image’s sturdiest tree to the left. The pole replaced the tree, and the shrub, which was far too green for my taste anyway, became a burning bush. The inner flames multiply Mary Pratt’s "Bonfire" (1997). The collage is called "Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You", and it’s intended to be the central, radiating image of my new expressionist video essay-in-progress The Albatross: On Not Wanting to Know.

French artist Gustav Doré’s elaborately detailed wood engravings for the 1875 edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner match the high Romanticism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 long lyrical poem. Extravagantly mannered and often overreaching for the Sublime, the engravings wallow in lavish melancholy and frequently tip over into kitsch, which is one of the things that draws me to them.

I didn’t want to intervene too much with these six collages, confining myself to only lightly tinting some of them but going for theatrical excess with the rich indigo of the ship and the flower-choked sea in "Not a Drop to Drink". In the Doré engravings the albatross’s wings look drab and rather limp, especially after the bird’s murder, so I borrowed marble wings from a Nan Goldin photograph of Antonio Canova’s Neoclassical sculpture "Psyche Revived By Cupid’s Kiss" (1787).

I overlaid all the images with sheets of washi and other Japanese papers so fine as to be difficult to work with. Use too much glue and the gossamer paper itself dissolves. And once the paper’s in place it’s almost impossible to smooth out, it tears so easily. First try – "Fallen Wings" - I was horrified by the results: the paper wrinkled and the glue pooled, leaving air pockets across the collage’s surface. But once the image had fully dried I liked the strange and unpredictable new textures, which amplified the antiquity of Doré’s original and added mystery and gothic highlights.