Paper Stacks

The Altered Page did a call for collaboration in displaying paper stacks. You know the ones I mean, the altered books, ATCs, collaborative journals, art swaps etc., that many of us participate in. Were I feeling ambitious, I would have done a tarot deck stack from all of the decks I have either created on my own or participated in collaboratively. Another impressive stack would have been my ATCs from swaps. Instead I decided to pay homage to one of my favorite collaborative groups, The Recollection Parlor. Although it has been rather moribund recently, in its heyday the Recollection Parlor hosted some challenging and imaginative swaps. Because the caliber of the artists was uniformly high, you always got really beautiful work from the other artists.
The premise of the Recollection Parlor was to create a unique country and then make the artistic things any country would need such as maps, currency, tourist guides, flyers for special events, travel journals and anything else folks came up with including the ubiquitous (at least where I hang out) tarot deck.
I named my country Niara after one of my nieces and as I started accumulating treasures for my country and those from swaps with other countries, I needed a place to store them. I found this treasure chest at Ross for a decent price and thought it would be perfect

And here is my stack of goodies from this treasure chest.

The fun part was taking the items out of their protective baggies and glassine envelopes and reacquainting myself with them again. People get busy and other things take priority and sometimes you just run out of steam. But while it was active the Recollection Parlor gave my art skills a huge boost. The standards were high, which pushed me to improve my work in every swap.