Claire Millikin – The World Itself: A Conversation with Collage Artist Jeri Theriault

CM: An accomplished poet, you’ve also long been committed to the practice of making visual art, primarily collage. It fascinates me that you bridge these disciplines—poetry and visual collage. When did you begin the practice of creating visual art and how does that origin intersect with, emerge, or diverge from, your working life as a poet? How is it that creating visual art/collage “thinks” differently from writing?

JT: I began making visual art in 2007 after the end of my second marriage. I was living in Prague at the time, and I found myself with a severe case of writer’s block. My neighbor, Tanya, a Russian artist, gave me some paint and glue and other materials. I started obsessively sketching and making art, learning, in the most visceral way, how to create something visual. I was ripping bits of paper and putting them together with glue and paint. With poetry, I might assemble a series of images (or sounds), but I think narrative order exerts a stronger influence in my writing than on the visual work.

CM: You say you learned collaging in a visceral, non-narrative way, and I love that description; is collage making still visceral for you—I’m thinking here of MauriceMerleau-Ponty’s idea of thinking through touch. What does visceral thinking/creating mean to you, in collaging?

JT: Yes, thinking through touch is a wonderful description of collage making. In those early days, I needed—my body needed—to be making something. Sensory involvement—choosing the materials (by color rather than by meaning, by texture, and pattern—all these non-verbal attributes) was freeing for me.

CM: What materials are essential and important to you in making collages? What conceptual/emotional components spur the creation of a collage? How do the material elements merge with the conceptual/emotional elements?

JT: I like to use discarded material. I once carted six boxes of old National Geographic issues from my colleague’s classroom. They have been both treasure trove and inspiration. I find the lush photos inspiring. These are vintage issues—from the ‘70s and ‘80s, so the paper is exquisite. Fractured City was inspired by three separate urban spreads in National Geographic.

I ripped three scenes into strips and layered them, working intuitively, piecing what was pleasing. I like the pulse and rhythm that resulted; everyone, everything felt like it was moving. The word “fractured” was meant to denote those fissures on the page—which paradoxically are part of the wholeness of the city—cracks in the sidewalk, potholes, and loneliness.

CM: I’d like to know more about the decision to use discarded material. I love that; it connects with a sense of creating from the refuse, rubbish, and lostness of our strange world.

JT: I do sometimes use new papers in a collage, but my main materials come from magazines, junk mail, paper bags, and advertising. The material is already “laden with meaning.” Sometimes there are words included with the photos or images but, even without words, there’s all this “borrowed” imagery. It’s like using the world itself to make art.

CM: Could you say something about Seed Pod and narrative or lack of narrative thinking? That collage was made during the pandemic and yet it looks so hopeful, full of energy and life. I’m intrigued it was created during the pandemic.

JT: Oh, yes, this piece is so lively! I remember the process of hand-ripping three different papers, one of them a paper bag. I found myself curving the rips—to suggest this movement—like arms flung up in dance or opening in the process of seeding.

CM: Seed Pod is a nice emblem for creative energy. Poesis (where we get the word poetry), as you know, means making. I wonder if your work in collage ever feels like a visual poem? Here I don’t quite mean how your collages incorporate words (which is a part of your work that I love), but rather how the collages are images as “made signs,” signifiers that express thought differently than words. In what ways do you think and feel differently when making these collaged thought-signs than when you are writing?

JT: It’s like the difference between being in a room and an open field. Not that writing poetry feels confining—but there is the element of order that imposes itself there—the need to “make some kind of sense” or to “tell a story.” With visual art, I can lose myself in the colors and shapes, so that the “meaning” must fend for itself. Of course, this may be a function of my education: all my education—undergrad and two advanced degrees—centered on writing. I have little formal training in visual art.

CM: This point of being “autodidact” as an artist is interesting. In #29 Detail you seem to be quoting from art history practice of pulling one detail out of a larger piece to discuss; so the piece seems very aware of art history discourse. What was the thought going through this collage?

JT: Well, I did take several courses in the Continuing Ed. Department at MECA—most of them with the wonderful teacher, Martha Miller—most of them were portraiture or life drawing. When making #29 Detail, I started with watercolor crayons, so I had the mixed media and then the juxtaposed shapes.

CM: Your most recent poetry book, Self-Portrait as Homestead, emphasizes what I will gloss here as woman’s experience (bearing in mind that the social/cultural construct of what is a woman is fluid), familial inheritance through the so-called distaff line. Do you feel that your work in collage makes visible the invisible female labor of earlier generations of family members? Along those lines, with your collage exhibit at the Yarmouth Historical Society, in the fall of 2024, I was struck by the vibrant variegated colors of the collages and how the different collages spoke to each other in that collected space. Do you conceive of your collages in series, do they speak to each other?

JT: I wanted to create new work for the Yarmouth show. I was looking for a theme and thought of my grandmother’s making. She was a busy-hands kind of woman, like so many of her generation. So, for the Yarmouth Art Show, I started thinking about patchwork, looking at traditional patterns. I started drawing grids on my canvases and then choosing general color schemes for each piece. Another inspiration at that time was the Louise Nevelson exhibit at the Colby Museum of Art. I had seen Nevelson’s work before, here and there, but the depth and range of The World Outside: Louise Nevelson at Midcentury absolutely awed me and left me inspired to create. I started making work in early June and by September fifth when I delivered my pieces to the YHC, I had made thirty-seven pieces, ranging in size from 8-by-8 to 20-by-20 inches.

I tried to maintain spontaneity in this process, but certain patterns emerged. People kept appearing, for example. And windows became important, sometimes doors and other architectural elements. I called the exhibit, Counterpanes and Other Fabrications.

Here is what I was thinking: a counterpane is essentially a colorful bed covering, usually handmade, often a quilt. I wanted to honor the practical use of women’s work. These pieces both resemble and feature windowpanes, a way of seeing beyond the domestic—the window is a source of illumination, and a means of escape. I also like the word “fabrications” which contains the word “fabric,” my Mémère’s medium.

CM: Kitchen Windows fits into this pattern of collaged windows. Its colors are soothing but when I look deeper, there are unsettling vistas, “scrapped” places.

JT: I think the fractured nature of collage—and in this case—the grid, offers quite a bit to think about. Overall, Kitchen Windows is a single window—with lots of little windows. They feel broken. There’s a feeling of clutter—like the backroom or attic full of castoffs. I also feel as though the white squares are a kind of mismatched wallpaper. So, despite that vivid blue, this one is a bit sad—like an abandoned house. I did not intend to make a sad piece, but I remember feeling that I had once it was complete.

CM: Sadness can come with the territory of intergenerational memory, right? Along the lines of visual conversation across generations, you mention Nevelson and, from talking with you, I know your affinity for Louise Bourgeois’s work. Did aspects of tapestry and bricolage draw you to the work of collage to begin with, or are the influences of Mémère, Nevelson, and Bourgeois more organically emergent through your years-long practice of creating collages? I see their influence particularly in your gorgeous collage Slice of Life.

JT: I’ve always admired Nevelson—I think for the same reason I admire patchwork quilt patterns. I love texture as much as I love color. I think Slice of Life is an urban piece and maybe that aligns it with Nevelson. As for Bourgeois, before I began making collages, I knew her work only lightly—and mostly the large-scale sculptures. My interest in her later work, the Woven Child pieces, arose from my own collage practice.

CM: Woven Child does seem as if created especially for you to contemplate! This complicating and merging, and pulling apart, of the boundaries between collage and quilt, image and textile, is a link between Bourgeois’ and your work. You also share a kind of sidelong gaze at humanity.

JT: Well, I find it interesting that for Bourgeois, the spider represents the mother. And for me, all of that merging and pulling apart, making and piecing together, are actions I associate with the mother or grandmother. Decades ago, I wrote Patchwork, a poem about my Mémère piecing a quilt from the literal fabric of family life—denim work pants and school clothes, a first communion dress and an apron. More recently, Woman as Verb does something similar, but a spider appears, adjunct to the grandmother and her daughters and granddaughters, who come together to piece a quilt, an action that is much larger than itself.

They remake

the world with words and stitches

as spider weaves

porch corners and attics.