Collaging Experimentation: 1000 Worlds

Collaging feels so organic and playful and ruthless. You've found something in the world to make yours. It's not like painstakingly painting your own creation or curving a felt tip to the shape in your head. It's more like ripping little pieces of yourself, your presence, and stitching them together. There's a little bit of you in everything, and a little bit of everything in you. The world becomes your reflection. Other people's words and visions become you, too, flailing and folded and quick. It's great. Collage is like my own little paper world and I love it.

I started a book that I want to fill with collage, to try out a few different ideas. I feel like mixing in text adds more of a narrative. It feels like you're looking at a weird storybook, almost. Even just one word means something is happening, something is being described with letters.

I also wanted to cut pictures up into little pieces and then put them all together. Then the separate pictures become one. All spliced together like a warped version of natural cohabitation. All the shapes sinking into each other by osmosis, by their nearness.

Also just paying attention to the colours. The washed out grey textures of newsprint, the brightness of flowers and citrus fruits against cloudy wisps of hair. And my pink and yellow brushstrokes making fruit salad on the page.

I'll make a thousand worlds and then choose one to live in.