GO MAKE SOMETHING WITH YOUR HANDS

I recently posted a collage and was stunned by the response. Here’s what the medium means to me.

For accessibility, here’s the text-only essay ;

This week I posted a note on Substack of one of my recent collages inspired by my trip to Cinque Terre. In just 2 days, the photo got more than two thousand likes and a plethora of very lovely comments and shares. I was shocked. This was far more attention than anything else I’d shared had received. I wasn’t sure how my small substack audience would feel about collage (a creative practice nearly if not equally important to me as writing) but I was pleasantly surprised by the response. In honor of the interest and the few kind souls who commented asking for “more”, I’ve decided to spend this week pontificating further on the art form and what it means to me.

For the majority of my life I’ve considered myself primarily a “writer” (though, even claiming that title still feels like a leap (but that’s a subject for another post)). I was born with an intrinsic love of language; an infatuation with the way syllables sidle up against one another to create sounds, how consonants clatter and sentences ramble and rise and fall like the ocean in every kind of weather. Since I was old enough to hold a pen, I’ve been plagued by the need to record– to notate, make stories of, to express beauty through words on the page. This is both a great gift and an unshakable curse. (See here Joan Didion’s On Keeping A Notebook: “Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”). My friend Hana once said that “to write is an affliction”, and I think about that line often.

Writing though, at least for me, is often a clarifying act; it brings ideas into focus, helps take the tangled strands of thought in my mind and weave them into something whole– something warm and inviting, comfortable to sit with for a while. I’ve spent most of my life disappointed by the words that come out of my mouth. I am constantly afflicted by the inability to verbally express myself as eloquently as I feel I should. In writing though, I have the time and space to present my truest and best self– what feels like the real me.

But existence isn’t always meant to be clarified. I learned, when my dad died suddenly before the start of my tenth grade year, that a lot of life simply makes no sense at all. You can’t always create beautiful language from something because sometimes there is no beauty to be found. Sometimes there is darkness– a lot of it. And it’s hard to write in the dark.

And perhaps this is how, and why, collage has since emerged as a prominent mode of expression in my life. Unlike writing, collage lives in liminal spaces. It is not a “neat” art form. It is not bound by grammar and syntax, logic and formatting and language. It requires very little training or (frankly) skill. Collage celebrates rough edges and layered illustration, it accepts imperfections and the reality that not every piece of a whole is visible at once. There are secrets in collage; unknown bits beneath foreground layers that may never be witnessed by the viewer but are there nonetheless, just as each of us contains pieces and stories fundamental to our selfhood that may never be made visible to others. Collage asks us to be okay with the unknown – unanswered questions and unexplainable truths.

Where writing clarifies, collage complicates. When I feel linguistically stuck, I turn to what I call my “mixed media journal”. This journal is a space I reserve solely for improvisation. I don’t plan out my finished product beforehand or arrange pieces carefully prior to gluing them down. I just go with the proverbial flow and see what happens. Often, as some sort of visual composition begins to emerge, I feel the spark of language reignite, and I add words to the page. Some of my most unexpected and personal writing has begun this way. Like ekphrasis in reverse. Collage seems to access and unlock some part of my subconscious that simply sitting and thinking about what to write cannot. It’s a decisive act of excavation; an active attempt at engaging an alternative part of the brain in order to break free from whatever is blocking me.

Historically, collage art has been defined by an interest in and engagement with surrealism. Look up collage on pinterest or Society 6 the first thing you’ll see is a variety of surreal, often vintage-looking pieces. These works play with ideas of scale and perspective, with cut-outs and substitutes designed to make the viewer do a double take. Surreal collage art is expansive, it’s joy-sparking. It encourages an indulgence in the idea that our world is not always exactly how it seems, or, that an alternative world exists where glaciers are just giant spilled ice cream cones and martinis are mini swimming pools. I like that idea.

Still, the majority of the pieces you’ll find on a first pass through the online world of collage art are digitally created, meaning they are made using downloaded images and products like photoshop. Digital collage art is wonderful – it affords much more freedom and possibility than analog collage. It can be done anywhere, anytime, without the need for specific materials and tools. And it sells well. I’ve done plenty of digital collage, and I still use it for certain projects where it’s more suited to my end goal, but analog collage is what’s closest to my heart. Analog collage means using actual paper and raw materials; cutting or tearing them with your own two hands and physically assembling the pieces together. Analog collage results in pieces with tactility and depth that digital collage is simply incapable of replicating. To me, analog collage represents an interest in and dedication to process as something equally valuable to product.

Creating something with your hands yields a deeper satisfaction than creating on a screen. Like photoshopped collage, digital writing too can sometimes feel (at least to me) oddly apathetic. There’s a curious distance between the emotional engagement in writing and the act of producing little black shapes on a screen that somehow amount to words and sentences and ideas. Analog collage though, like baking or knitting or ceramics, requires tactile physical engagement. It creates a material finished product you can hold in your hands where before there was nothing. Something about that is pure magic. I like feeling my fingers tacky with half-dried glue. I like the different weight and texture of papers against my palm. The sensory experience of collage gives the art form a meditative, grounding quality that staring at a screen will never replicate. If I were ever given the opportunity to exhibit my work, I’d want people to be able to touch it. I’d want to have a whole wall that was a communal collage; a living, breathing, democratic creation to which anything could be added. Glue on the receipt from your morning coffee, write a memory from your day on top of someone else’s family photo. Feel the layers of storytelling and shared history build on top of one another.

In the age of AI art, this physicality is more meaningful than ever. AI can produce a two dimensional “collage-like” image in a second, but it cannot actually glue paper together. It can’t tear a magazine apart into unexpected pieces that reassemble like perfectly imperfect mosaics. What’s more, analog collage as an art form has the unique quality of being made up entirely of “primary sources”; pre-existing elements taken from somewhere else (a magazine, a book, a pile of old postcards). Where AI is shrouded in controversy over the origin of its data and inspiration and whether those sources are getting their proper due, analog collage presents a refreshing contrast in which sources are the art itself. Creators have been borrowing and stealing each other's ideas since the beginning of time, collage simply makes these iterations visible. It celebrates the idea of a shared, ongoing creativity that builds upon itself over time; a microcosmic representation of the larger creative zeitgeists that define generations and artistic movements.

I still consider myself very much a beginner when it comes to collage. I’ve only recently started shifting my style away from more pop-art like surrealism to abstract works incorporating various textures and my own writing. There is so much still to learn about and experiment with, and I’m enjoying the journey.

To all who liked, commented on, or shared my Cinque Terre piece: thank you! I’d like to think that I find value and meaning in my work regardless of its reception but sometimes a few kind responses is just the boost you need to stay inspired.

And, if you have a bit of free time and some old magazines lying around, try making the cut yourself. They say the first one is the deepest.