Claire Holmes Collage

Philosophy/Ideology:

Unlike animals we are constantly asking questions about why we are here and why everything is the way it is. Animals just are the way they are, but people are aware of everything and everyone around them. I believe that there is a reason people question the way everything works. We want to know how everything works so that in our selves we can do things with less effort. By learning I can acquire the knowledge to live more easily and have more time to do with what I want to do.

Artist Statement:

My collage is constructed on the idea that through learning we can acquire the knowledge to live with ease. Overtime humans have evolved from monkeys and developed a different type of brain. Our brain focuses on how do things by problem solving for the sake of knowing how to do it instead of just doing things from instinct. We have learned to have a concept of the whole world instead of just focusing on where we are. We have also learned to write things down, in order to remember them and have other people be able to understand them too. We use books to record most of these facts. Our knowledge is based on how things work and what had led to us discovering how they work.

For my collage I used simple colors in the background to represent the traditions of human life. The colors are similar, but they also change abruptly. I used the silhouettes and pictures of the evolution timeline to represent how we have developed over time and the pictures of apes to show where we came from. I used the pictures of brains and the silhouettes of head with trees in them to represent that our knowledge is growing and going to continue to grow. The man in the middle of my collage who is holding a book and sitting on top of about a thousand other ones represents humans’ desire to learn. I also made a head with a comic like bubble coming out of it that says ‘knowledge’ to represent that he was bursting with knowledge. The hand in the right bottom corner is holding books that I constructed and also pictures of books to show that we have all the knowledge we want in the palm of our hands.

This collage represents that humans are different from animals because even though we evolved from animals, we understand what we are and what is around us. We learn because we crave the different abilities we are capable of. By learning people can acquire the knowledge to live more easily and have more time to do with what they want to do.