Slashing Symbols | Dawn Hunter | South Carolina Sunshine™

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Faces, flower, punctuation, and geometric forms

FOUNDATIONS: ARTS 103

Slashing Symbols:
From Visual Form to Meaning

by Dawn Hunter, Project Author

and ARTS 103 Course Director

“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”

— John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)

After exploring the elements and principles of design in the first portion of the ARTS 103 course, students can begin to explore how the formal choices that they have been employing in their artwork can have associations, convey meaning and more in the Slashing Symbols Workshop. In this workshop, students apply their knowledge of how to make effective compositions in order to explore how symbols function and how they can be used in artwork to explore concepts.

Slashing Symbols. Student collage exploring how intuitive image selection and juxtaposition can generate unexpected symbolic relationships. Photographic figures, butterflies, fire-like forms, typography, pattern, and fragments of text are removed from their original contexts and reorganized into a new visual structure. The resulting composition demonstrates how formal choices can lead to associations and meanings that students identify and interpret after the making process.

Vertical mixed-media collage with a blue field of butterflies, a black-and-white standing figure, a large child’s face surrounded by an orange circular form, cropped legs in boots, multicolored striped patterns, fragments of cut-out words and letters, and a background containing black printed characters.

Continued, Slashing Symbols:

We start the workshop with a fast and intuitive collage exercise using popular magazines, like Vogue, National Geographic, Architectural Digest etc. The students choose images, colors, shapes and text that attract them immediately and start building a composition within 25 minutes. No preliminary sketching or conceiving of a concept, students work with the visual material at hand and start to make meaningful relationships between the elements by using the knowledge of composition that they developed in the earlier projects.

The Process

First, students make a quick collage using images, shapes, and colors from popular magazines and then study their own work. Through lecture, class discussion, and plenty of examples from art, advertisements, popular culture, and historical imagery, the Slashing Symbols Workshop studies symbolism and visual language. Students will learn about how symbols are perceived in different cultures and how images of familiar objects can be given new meanings by being used in different ways such as by being appropriated, being placed beside other images, being layered on top of other images, and being placed in a different context.

Vertical collage featuring a woman dressed as a chef holding scissors behind an enlarged hand emerging from a metal bowl. The background is constructed from interwoven rectangular strips of photographs of brown, black, red, and blond hair.

Slashing Symbols. Student collages exploring how familiar imagery can be transformed through intuitive selection, juxtaposition, repetition, scale, and re-contextualization. Photographic figures, patterns, typography, and objects drawn from popular culture are reorganized into unexpected visual relationships. Although formal decisions guide the initial construction of the collages, the resulting combinations invite students to consider the symbolic associations and meanings that emerge through the creative process.

The Process continued:

These concepts can then be applied to the student’s own work to look at symbolism, iconography, metaphor, appropriation, layering and re-contextualization. Archetypes will be discussed and how they originated from Carl Jung’s theories on symbolistic imagery. This will enable students to see that there are many different interpretations of symbols and that their meaning can stem from a variety of influences including from cultural and historical tradition, popular culture, personal experience and from the context in which they are viewed.

Studying one’s own collage with different eyes: What images did one keep returning to? Which colors, figures, objects, words or shapes did one find most alluring? How did the relationships between separate, disparate images change after they were combined? How did issues of scale, repetition, hierarchy, cropping and placement affect one’s reading of the images? And most important, how did an image change when it was removed from its advertised context and placed within a new composition?

Moving from making to interpreting, students see how an image originally created as advertising for a product can function quite differently when it is removed from its advertising context. A simple photograph, word, color, or familiar object can become funny, disturbing, unclear, metaphorical, or even personal when placed near other images. This also helps students realize that images communicate not only by themselves but also by their context, by how they are placed in relation to other images, by the visual relationships between them, and by the viewer’s interpretation of them.

Color collage featuring green apples, a cropped woman’s face, two frogs, a cigarette, ornamental flowers, vegetation, a surfboard, and a small illustrated portrait arranged across the page.

Slashing Symbols. Student collages exploring intuitive selection, juxtaposition, repetition, and visual organization. Images drawn from advertising and popular culture are removed from their original contexts and recombined through relationships of shape, color, scale, and proximity. The process allows formal decisions to guide the initial construction of each collage before students interpret the symbolic associations and meanings that emerge from their selections.

From Formal Language to Conceptual Meaning

The workshop for Slashing Symbols marks an important transition within the framework of the curriculum for ARTS 103. The purpose of students’ formal knowledge is shifted in the workshop as opposed to the earlier projects where students recognized and manipulated visual relationships such as how repetition can make a rhythm, how scale affects hierarchy, positive and negative space, and how one can direct attention within a composition. What did I emphasize? Why am I interested in this image? What does the repetition in this image say? How does the context of the image change when I change the image?

Mixed-media student collage dominated by a large black raven surrounded by smaller images of ravens and wings. Purple flowers and textured forms, green foliage, a bare tree, and fragments of yellow and green imagery overlap to create an irregular vertical composition.

Slashing Symbols. Student collage using repetition, scale, and a concentrated color palette to transform intuitively selected imagery into a visually unified composition. Repeated images of ravens, wings, flowers, and trees establish associations among nature, transformation, and symbolic meaning. The work demonstrates how recurring imagery discovered through the collage process can begin to suggest a personal visual language.

The elements and principles of design therefore become more than criteria for organizing a successful composition. They become tools through which students can construct and interpret meaning. Shape can carry association. Repetition can intensify an idea. Scale can alter the significance of an image. Juxtaposition can create an entirely new relationship between otherwise unrelated forms. The formal and conceptual are no longer treated as separate concerns.

The Assignment Sheet
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Vertical collage with a central female figure in an orange and gold dress surrounded by black paper, glowing circular forms, reddish-orange torn shapes, and fragments of patterned imagery.

Conclusion

Slashing Symbols prepares students for the Tree and Final projects that follow, where they are asked to make increasingly independent decisions about imagery, metaphor, composition, and meaning. The workshop gives them an intermediate space in which to discover that they are already capable of making visual choices that suggest ideas—even when those ideas were not completely determined in advance. By working through a series of interpretations, the students are also able to better understand their own visual language and use it intentionally in their choices.

So while Slashing Symbols prepares students for the subsequent metaphorical Tree and Final projects, where they will be making independent decisions about imagery, metaphor, composition and meaning, it first prepares them for the ability to utilize what they have learned to make decisions about content as well as form.

In this section: Slashing Symbols. Student collage organized through a restricted palette of black, orange, red, and gold. Repeated circular and fragmented forms surround a central figure, demonstrating how color, repetition, contrast, and placement can unify independently selected images and suggest symbolic relationships.