Enjoy this flipbook preview of my new collage works in the order they were created over 2022-25. I recommend a full-screen view on your laptop, desktop, or tablet. Each collage is its own little world worthy of pause, careful looking, and a clear view.
8x10 prints available for $25! I have some in stock, and I take special orders. Get in touch! Or use the QR code at the end of the booklet.
Artist Statement + Extended Commentary for DECONTEXTUALIZED
I make dreamlike abstract collages out of print media and paper ephemera from mid-century to today, including miscellaneous scraps from my desk and daily life. They're like layered visual koans -- evocative yet unanswerable questions. I'm chasing a satisfaction that occurs when wildly disparate, seemingly unrelated images click into place under my fingertips, in instances of strange compositional serendipity. Given the content of my previous drawing/painting work, it’s extra fun to swim around in abstraction – and to deal in imagery that already exists, rather than having to conjure it all myself.
The unusual layered, transparent, and grungy effects showcased in this body of work are accomplished with a packing tape lift/transfer technique that I learned about, tried, and instantly loved. Collecting, selecting, preparing, and organizing my source materials happens in stages, usually long before I actually sit down for a work session. I stick to free, found, or cheap stuff: magazines, books, booklets, newspapers, scraps, packaging. I paw through piles and I sort, gaze, rip, cut, arrange and rearrange until something begins to gel. This project is a great way to exercise artistic instincts for design and composition that I’ve developed over decades – not solely through visual art style and practice but also, I suspect, through years of embodied experience with heavily composition-based ensemble art forms: modern dance (dancer), rock bands (drummer), and polyphonic, a capella shape-note songs in the Sacred Harp tradition (singer).
Historically, collage was something I would dabble in from time to time – influenced by areas of DIY/punk/zine counterculture and therapeutic Expressive Arts. But this unprecedented cohesive series that became DECONTEXTUALIZED was born of two specific influences during late Covid times:
1. Two artists who I started following on Instagram during the pandemic, both of whom will sometimes post paper collages that appear to have see-through layers (!?) which made no sense to me. In trying to solve that confounding craft mystery – I stumbled upon the packing tape transfer method and absolutely LOVED it. It opens up a whole other world of possibility.
2. Being quite literally decontextualized in my personal life as I was making the work!
After 25 years living in the quaint 5-college area of Western Massachusetts, a series of losses and changes – including but not limited to job loss and gentrification of the area – made it so that I couldn’t stay there. That’s how I ended up in an unfamiliar city, unemployed, with a fraction of my belongings, staying with the only person I knew there: An old friend who lived in a 1980s mobile home in an urban trailer park. A talented, prolific songwriter and painter with an extra room, a cute dog, and a serious drug habit in full swing. It was in that new and complicated environment, in an uprooted/dislocated liminal state, that I made most of these collages. When that arrangement became untenable for me — and perhaps it always was — I left that city for the opposite extreme: a very rural setting (population 400-something) wherein I was even more decontextualized than before. I knew zero people! No old friend or nostalgic reconnection. I became just a random person working in a kitchen. I was also the only resident Gen X woman in the live/work community I’d joined. And the only artist!
I made the last handful of collages in the series while getting used to that setting.
I’ll probably make more!
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On the one hand, I would assert that my collage designs are mainly concerned with the pleasures of texture, density, balance, dynamics, movement, tension, rhythm, and color -- minus any narrative element at all. On the other hand, I can see that perhaps I was using the new collage technique to metabolize (and improve) the lonely and disorienting situations I found myself in. The collages are like memory fragments, dreams, and familiar detritus all trying to arrange themselves together into some kind of picture. On the third hand, I can see that cycling repeatedly through the process of material destruction >> chaos/liminality/unknown >> repair/rebuilding from fragments – which is what you’re doing when you collage – seems like a powerful analog to my lived experience of abuse (destruction), survival (chaos/liminality/unknown), and recovery (repair/rebuilding). It’s like my hands want to play out the whole three-part process/three-act play over and over again themselves. And the results, AKA these collages, are way more evocative and succinct than anything I’ve attempted to write out in long form text that’s directly about my life. Perhaps I’ll pair the two together? TBD on that front.
So, my collages are both/and: They are first and foremost delightful abstract puzzles free from narrative, AND perhaps they are inescapably tangled up with aspects of my own psyche and circumstances – while not being “about” either!