I recently finished reading Winter by Christopher Nicholson, a beautifully written novel based on Thomas Hardy's life in his last years. I had read a biography of Hardy a few years ago, which I found fascinating, and this week I got out a picture book of Hardy country and also began reading one of his novels.
All this has put me in mind of Dorset, which I visited in 2009 and again in 2012, as well as several times with my family when I was young, when I had an aunt living in Bournemouth.
This particular collage was based on three days in Dorset in June 2009. I was staying in Abbotsbury, and so I visited the Swannery and walked up the hill through the sheep fields to St. Catherine's Chapel. An English friend drove me all around Dorset. We saw Thomas Hardy's birth place and Poundbury (at my request), stopped at the tea place in the lower right, and walked around to see the flowery cottages in Burton Bradstock. We also spent time in Shaftesbury and Sherborne, which don't appear in the collage, and drove through much lovely countryside on a splendid June day.
I like collage because it seems to capture the way memory works more than single images. The memories float and swirl around and mix in a rather dream-like way. I made this collage when I had access to Photoshop, so I was able to use layering and transparency, etc., not just arrange photos into collages as I do now on PicMonkey. I've got to find a way to get back to Photoshop.
