Pop 89: More Wonder Under the Moon

By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com

Last year, in the depths of my isolation, I got an email from Tammy Willman at The Grand Coteau in Shaunavon, wondering if I might want to enter anything in the holiday art show. I was submerged in my writing at the time, but I knew the call was a gift. Writing can be a ridiculous mental strain. Occasionally I need to temper it with a different kind of creative endeavour, something less controlled – or controllable.

For me, that endeavour is collage. The beauty of collage is that all a person has to do is sit with scissors and old books and magazines, crack one’s mind wide open, and let the play begin. So, I said yes to Tammy, and the ongoing series Wonder Under the Moon was born.

This year I’m calling part two of the series More Wonder Under the Moon. I’m describing it as a response to a growing heaviness in a so world pressed down by fear and isolation; it feels as though a symptom of covid might not just be loss of sense of smell, but of sense of Wonder too. I mean no disrespect to those who have been touched by the pandemic, but it may be we’ve also lost a sense of humour, as well, and with that a sense of well-being. Some might say common sense has also gone missing.

Often I behave out of a sense of injustice. But sometimes, it’s righteous indignance masquerading as a sense of rightness. No one needs to hear me pontificate. I prefer instead to go looking for my sense of Wonder. Thankfully, I live on the prairie, where there is a ready supply of wonder-provoking phenomena, primary among them a rising harvest moon.

When stuck as to how to tell a story, I often start playing with images. At this very moment, I am sitting under a bulletin board covered in reprints of collages themed around aprons. While working at Prairie Wind & Silver Sage, our little schoolhouse museum here in Val Marie, I started collecting aprons and their stories. I noticed how many young women visitors marvelled at the hanging aprons as if they were relics from an ancient time. Some found them pretty, even cute; others viewed them like corsets or chastity belts, symbols of repression. I was disheartened by remarks that were dismissive, even derisive.

These women are missing out on their own history, I said to myself. I was wearing an apron at the time, a bibbed apron. Perhaps it’s a class judgment. Anyone in an apron is in the service industry. And service spells lower class? One thing is certain, these women didn’t see themselves as standing on the shoulders of giants - grandmother giants – far hardier and more resourceful than we’ve ever had to be. The apron was for them a kind of tether, binding women to the kitchen. But the kitchen in those days was a woman’s domain, her fortress, headquarters, the hub of all activity. And the apron was not a curiosity or a cocktail frill for show alone; it was a tool, toolkit, uniform, shield, armour, flag, blanket, and hanky, all in one.

I set to collecting images of women in aprons. Then images of men in aprons too: butchers, bakers, farriers, cooks. One night I placed an image of a chuckwagon cook next to a cut-out of a mother and her baby and another of a man standing in front of a café. And, after much arranging, rearranging and gluing, Charlie emerged.

Charlie’s now a fully formed character, and he shows up often, watching and advising and falling in love with many other characters in my writing. But that evening, as I allowed all the pieces to fall together, letting him take form, he became the subject of a collage called: They Taught Me Everything I Know. And the words at the top of the final piece read: At first, my mother, my sisters and aunts watched me like a hawk. Then I started to watch them. Now I own my own café.

Searching for new characters to help restore my childhood sense of Wonder, I put on my paint-splattered apron, pull out brushes and pens and crayons, and pour over old books, looking for another bright face to walk into a new life on a canvas. Here’s a little girl looking up at the night sky. Here’s a man hoisting a hay bale. Here’s a dog hidden in the corner of a copy of a Gustav Dore print. He’s avoiding a crowd, but I will transfer onto an open field with the girl and the man, and they will suddenly be all agog, caught mid-action, captive to a state of Wonder, transformed by the slowly rising big fat full moon.

The process of making up worlds of Wonder is as rewarding as finishing them and hanging them on the wall. As an artist, you can’t ask for anything better than that. I sold all the pieces last year, but I still have copies of them. And they await me, replete with stories yet to be told. One of them is of two little girls. One girl is in a tree. The other is on the ground. I believe they are sisters. I can hear the one on the ground saying: “Inez, Daddy says you got to come down now.” Silence. Then: “What do you see up there?” Answer: “Dogs. The moon. No, wait. I see the future.” “You’re crazy, Inez. Come down, or else.” I don’t know what happens next. I don’t know where they are. Or why one is called Inez. But such is the reward of Wonder, when you throw a bunch of images together and await what happens next.

I think it’s Wonder that will save us. Wonder is akin to hope. It’s without artifice. It is deeply personal and arises spontaneously from within. I might dare to say, Wonder is the soul’s expression. And, while perhaps it’s Grace, Wonder’s sister, who actually saves us, Wonder makes the world worth the bother.