Deja Vu

Following in the footsteps of yesterday here is another spread in my art journal. This one was done even longer ago and dated 8th July. I thought I might as well get on with showing it to you rather than postpone it even longer (wish I had the same spirit about writing Xmas cards but alas!). It's a quite personal spread about the phenomenon of "Deja Vu".

I experienced my first Deja Vu moment way back when I was about 15 or 16 during a school trip to Trier. As we arrived by bus at the youth hostel I found myself walking right up the steps on the girl's side (there was strict separation between the sexes in those days!) to our allocated room. Because I knew the way. I had never been to Trier before let alone this youth hostel. It was a deeply unnerving experience and hard to understand at that age so I kept it to myself. It has happened numerous times since, sometimes at important events, and at other times during utterly mundane moments, when I am just stitching away in my studio listening to a talking book and feeling I have lived that moment before and heard those words.

There are of course explanations for the Deja Vue experience and I'm far from unique. Personally I like to think of it as a parallel universe where we briefly slip through a curtain between times. As Einstein said: "The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once".

When I found text about a Deja Vu experience in a vintage book (Proverbial Philosophy, 1867) I decided to celebrate this phenomenon rather than treat it as something to keep to myself as I had done thus far. This is the resulting spread. The background was done with Inktense blocks and activated with water. I used the Circles, Circles stencil from Stencilgirl to achieve the circles in the sky.

I added postage stamps along the bottom edge of the spread as well as half way up the sides and collaged vintage images and text onto the pages too. I also used rubber stamps (Dark Room Door Full Bloom stamp) to add interest. The next step was to use Stencilgirl's Windswept Tree mask and Liquitex black permanent ink spray to grow the two trees on either side.

By then an injection of colour was required and I used Stencilgirl's Flowers, Pomegranates and Leaves stencil and more permanent spray ink in various colours. I used permanent paint markers to add more colour and also to outline the various elements. The vintage text that had started it all was glued on in the sky. It reads:

" Have ye not confessed to a feeling,

a consciousness strange and vague,

That ye have gone this way before,

and walk again your daily life."

 

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