I’ve finally got a handle on how many homunculus badges i’m going to be making – it’s currently around the 410 mark. A lot less stressful that the 1500+ I estimated at the beginning! As I’ve been making them i’ve been pinning them to a large square canvas, partially for safekeeping and partially to see how they looked together, and they seem to work both as a collection and as individual pieces:

One of my major problems during this course has been what to do with old work – I still have the mutantscope sitting in my bedroom, my house is overflowing with artwork, and there’s no way to keep everything. Plus the scroll had the potential to be a bit of a white elephant – I’ve already exhibited it twice, and keeping it in my possession has always led to my being completely overzealous of it’s care, and it’s rather delicate and easily torn.

A beautiful example of how to use old work is Bob and Roberta Smith’s ‘The Bonfire’

This reminded me of the homunculus project in respect of the way it highlights sections of words – something i’ve noticed as i’ve been assembling the badges is odd, disparate words that are thrown together, such as ‘vivid processed meat’. Sometimes they read like haikus, some only show the damage age and light has done to the paper.

The process has also forced me to read the scroll, slowly and in detail, for the first time in quite a while – it’s reaffirmed to me how far I have come in the past couple of years, and is proving cathartic, like i’m trapping an old demon piece by piece, and the eventual distribution will be scattering the ashes of a part of myself I’ve longed to let go.