This collage was born from the leftovers. I had leftover materials, leftover thoughts, and leftover time. For a few weeks now, I've been wanting to make a collage about what a crime lab technician experiences because the lab techs are exposed to the elements at a crime scene for far longer than I am. These days, if the weather is terrible, and I no longer want to be shaking next to the crime scene tape, I can get inside a vehicle and quickly warm up. There were days when I had to do bus math, though, and calculate how soon a bus would arrive at a nearby bus stop and whether I could endure the heat or cold until then. One year, my calculations were off and I ended up sticking my fingers in the grill of a patrol car to stay warm. An officer who observed my actions felt bad for me and allowed me to stick my hands in front of the heaters inside his car. Eventually, he caved in and invited me to sit in the back seat. It was wonderful. I felt like a stray dog taken in by a stranger on a bitterly cold night. So, I thought: if that was my experience, then what were the lab techs experiencing on their end?
I asked around, and some techs said that while they're working, they think about how cold or hot the day is, how sad the incident is, and sometimes about how hungry they might be. That gave me a few ideas. I didn't know where to start, though. I only knew that I wanted to be careful about how I did it. After all, they collect evidence of terrible events. After careful thought, I chose a photo of a lab tech collecting items from an incident where no one was injured. There was gunfire that day, but the bullets struck glass. In the aftermath, investigators found a lone shoe and a green dice. I no longer had pictures of the shoe. At one point, in making the collage, I decided that I needed a substitute for the shoe because all I had was a crime lab technician with an evidence marker that said B on it. I rifled through hundreds of photos before finding a somewhat similar evidence marker with the letter A on it.
I didn't have a plan, but I did have impulse-purchase options. I sometimes buy terrible commercial art for the colors that can't be found among the "scrapbook moms" collage paper options. I didn't know what I was going to do with the dented and damaged stuff I'd bought. I focused on this particularly cheesy commercial art that quoted Robert Frost and decided to cut out the dark blue part that was reflected in the water. I have no idea why I made that decision. It was likely due to blue bias. Blue is my favorite color. I put the crime lab technician on top of it and still didn't know where I was going with any of that. Afterward, for some reason, I decided to make puddles in which to reflect the crime lab technician's thoughts. Since that looked good to me, I continued forward and tried to fill the silver/gray space with gold-colored paper to imply that the lab tech was working on a sunny day.
I made a lot of bad choices as I tried to piece together the collage. I think life is that way, too. I made a lot of bad choices as I tried to piece things together. I see what other people did, and even though I don't envy their lives, I do envy their stability. Very few things in my life have been stable. I've lost savings to one crisis or another, cars to one incident or another, and the occasional friend. I've lost a few dreams and I've watched a few other people pick them up and run with them. I'm still piecing things together, really. The point is that there doesn't have to be a straight path to an interesting ending. The straight path is a lie designed to numb the senses. It allows you to believe you're doing the right thing for yourself because it's easy to navigate, not because it fills the spaces in your heart.
The leftovers continued to drive my progress was. Once I realized that the gold paper wasn't going to work out, I turned to the leftover pages in the Hubble Window on the Universe book I'd bought at the thrift store for several dollars. I used that to fill the sky. Then, I filled the puddles with the things that a crime lab technician might come across on the streets. Bulk trash dumped in the alleyways. The Purple Route bus to Canton. Eventually, the content of the puddles shifted because I felt like the colors they contained needed to complement the colorful collage.
Since the lab techs I talked to mentioned that they spent time thinking about the weather while they were stuck in it, I decided to create heat waves in the space toward the top. The lab tech in my collage was dressed for warm weather. It made sense. I chopped up some rocks from a used museum book to achieve that goal. I'd added a "sun" at first because, in theory, the head waves were emanating around the sun. I got rid of that sun after it became clear that my effort to make heat waves looked a lot like someone dumped a chopped beef sandwich on the collage.
Here's the thing about bad ideas: they get worse before they get better. I kept working on my bad idea by turning to a commercial art of Buddha I'd bought for $15 a few months ago. I liked the colors that were in it. I chopped up the commercial art of Buddha and used its shiny fabric to create ripples. The more ripples I made, the more I wondered what I was doing. After all, puddles don't ripple. Maybe everything below the dividing line was a reflection rippling away from its point of origin, the thoughts of a lab tech ripppling out into the universe. All of a sudden, I knew what I was doing. That's what I love about making collages. Somewhere in the middle of the mess you've been making, you find a path forward and you commit to taking it into the future, even if you don't exactly know where it's going.
Eventually, I started to add clouds and create pockets of good and bad weather because the crime lab techs are exposed to all of it. Then, I found an old picture of this block of vacant houses around the corner from where I used to live and decided to cut them out for the collage. Later on, after I thought I was finished, a former colleague tool a look at my end product and encouraged me to give texture to the sky by adding more stars to it.
After the collage was complete, I returned to my old neighborhood and took a picture of it next to the space where the vacant houses used to stand. Their gaping doorways were gone. All of the roaches were gone. The danger of the houses burning down had disappeared, too. Everything had changed. The face of the city would continue to change. The fabric of all relationships would always be in a transitional state. It's the best and worst thing about life.