Queer Paper Gardens, Exhibition, Electricity Museum, Lisbon, 7 jun- 8 set 2013
Queer Paper Gardens, collage installation, Electricity Museum, Lisbon, 2013
View of installation and wall drawing
Collage workshop for artists and art educators, Electricity Museum, Lisbon, 2013
Queer Paper Gardens, collage installation, Electricity Museum, Lisbon, 2013
A collaborative project by artists Maria Lusitano and Paula Roush
Multimedia installation featuring video essays, mixed-media collage salon, drawings, publications, artist's books and archival material, 2012–2013.
Accompanied by workshops for artists and educators.
Queer Paper Gardens emerged from a three-year artistic research project exploring collage as a means of investigating the unconscious, identity, imagination and the construction of alternative realities.
At the heart of the research were two remarkable works of Surrealist literature and art: Valentine Penrose's Dons des Féminines (1951) and Max Ernst's collage novel Une semaine de bonté (1934). Both artists employed the interplay of poetry, found imagery and collage to explore the unconscious, creating dreamlike worlds in which familiar images acquire unexpected meanings and associations.
The research also drew inspiration from Victorian photocollage and the intricate botanical paper collages of eighteenth-century artist Mary Delany, tracing connections between historical practices of assembling images, imaginative storytelling and contemporary artistic experimentation.
The resulting exhibition brought together a multimedia installation featuring two video essays, Queer Paper Gardens and Exchanging Gifts in the Orient, alongside a collage salon, a large-scale wall drawing, several scrapbooks and a five-volume artist's book.
Together, these elements created an immersive visual environment in which collage became a language for exploring the imagination, the unconscious and the poetic possibilities of recombining fragments of existing realities.