Perspectives: Christiane Drieling
Ruston Collagist Christiane Drieling drops storybook characters into new worlds
Christiane Drieling has a theory. With an academic background in sociology, psychology, and German Literature, the German-Louisianan artist described herself as a lifelong observer, ever-curious about people and why they are the way they are. What formed them? What inspired them? Drawing from a gifted imagination and the impossible wealth of stories interacting across the scope of her daily life—in herself, in books, in global issues of politics and social justice— Drieling developed her art form as an exercise in character study, stemming from a suspicion that “the book world is really a parallel world to the ‘not book’ world.”
"Each time I reread a book, I see something different. And every single reader will see something different, too. And in the end, you often connect with characters as much as you connect with your neighbor, and those characters have an impact on who you are.”
—Collage artist Christiane Drieling
Granting the characters in literature a certain personhood, she imagines that they are really not so different from us in the material world in that they receive their identities, beyond their control, from an infinite number of outside perceptions. “We are born and then socialized, and we have our experiences, but in the end someone else is telling a eulogy of us and how we were, and this is how we are forever remembered,” she described. “This is the same for the characters in our books. It seems completely clear what their biography is, but it is probably never read quite exactly perfectly. The writer sees one thing, and the reader will see something else. Each time I reread a book, I see something different. And every single reader will see something different, too. And in the end, you often connect with characters as much as you connect with your neighbor, and those characters have an impact on who you are.”
Through the art of collage—which she describes as something between writing a book and creating a painting—Drieling plays upon these layers of reality and perception, drawing out entirely new stories, once again multiplied by the interpretations of each individual viewer. In “anything paper,” so long as it has an interesting history—record covers, every part of books, tickets, recipe cards, magazines—she discovers her characters, and she “relieves” them from the limitations of their original identities. “This person has been in a certain book for so long, living through a certain story for who knows how many years between these book covers. All of a sudden, I’ll place that person in a different scenario, and even then I know only partially what that person will do in this new story.”
Her 2020 Earth Series is still in development, with sixteen of her planned twenty-four collages completed. Each work is tied together by an oblong sketch of our Earth, which comes from the back covers of a set of 1960s LIFE World Library books given to Drieling by a friend. The series features the Earth as an ottoman, a disco ball, a balloon, a glass object representing Cinderella’s slipper, or a woman’s head, being exhaled from the mouth of a fish, and sitting quietly in a 1950s-style rocking chair. On first glance, Drieling’s tendency towards play emerges as whimsy and charm in these collages, but a closer look reveals darker layers. For example, in “You Should Be Dancing,” a work she completed in February of 2020, seventies schoolbook kids find a second life at the disco. But the reflecting droplets of light coming from the earth-disco ball are revealed to be “o”s, which in her blog Drieling notes signify “the typical sound in German language (and in other languages too) to express pain, empathy, or sorrow.” She writes, “There’s a lot of all that in the world. But we should be dancing nevertheless and even more so.”
“There are uncountable realities and my reality is not congruent with everybody else’s. That is the cosmos of my work. The more people who see it, the more meanings it absorbs.”
—Collage artist Christiane Drieling
Drieling’s blog holds a remarkable collection of essays to accompany each of her collages, describing her process and her explorations along the way. However, she expressed the importance that her viewers’ experiences not be limited by the meaning she ascribes to her own work. “It’s always up to the person who sees it,” she said. “There are uncountable realities and my reality is not congruent with everybody else’s. That is the cosmos of my work. The more people who see it, the more meanings it absorbs.”
A selection of Drieling’s body of work is currently on display in the exhibition It’s Not Too Late at the Monroe Regional Airport until mid-January, 2021. See more of her work and musings at christianedrieling.com.