My Life in Collage

Growing up I felt I didn’t have a voice, or rather that I had one I just was too afraid to use it. Expressing myself seemed to be an oppressive task. I was shy and introverted and found myself drawing further into myself without an outlet for the sea of emotions that was inside. My parents divorce left me with a sensation of choking, of feeling so much yet without a voice to express it, keeping thoughts and feelings wholly internal. I felt that my feelings were eating away at me, that my internal network was also being smothered by the weight of what I kept inside and I was at a loss with how to release it.

So instead of speaking and sharing what I was feeling with words, I took to drawing, finding medicine in letting my emotions process with pen in hand pressed to paper. Drawing became my way of communicating, a form of meditation to process what I was feeling. In drawing I found new worlds. I created faraway places that I would travel to, surrealist homes of escape that brought with them joy for what’s to come and a sense of understanding of the world, of myself, of what I was going through. It’s with drawing that I became happier, more assured of myself. It was an outlet that provided me with a time to think through my thoughts and feelings, to let them flow through me as they flowed through my mind.

As I got older, my practice shifted into exploring more materials. Scissors became an extension of my hands, creating a new medium of collaging, allowing me to expand upon the worlds I created. I became transfixed with collecting images from magazines. Of finding pieces that spoke to me in that moment, images that I was able to connect with. Exploring other worlds where I could see myself in. A vision board for what I wanted to call into my life, of my hopes and dreams and where I wanted to venture to, of how I want my life to look. Combining my past feelings with new images embedded with my sense of hope for what to look forward to. A flowering of the old feelings into the bits of myself that I look forward to becoming. To find images is a sort of treasure hunt for me, with the final pieces chosen serving as my treasure, little gems of things that connect to me, brought to me with my scissors for hands.

These processes serve as a sort of diary, my therapeutic project of recording my life in images, drawing my perception of life and what I’m experiencing and transposing it to a collection of imagery to remember my thoughts, my feelings, my experiences. What is created is my truth, my understanding of my life through the memory of why something was created, the forces behind each individual piece.

With collage I draw inspiration from the potential of varying images to create the new whole. This process of creating brings me happiness for living, an appreciation of all things experienced, and a deeper understanding of myself. When I’m older I will look back upon what I’ve created and remember it all, the ugly bits and the beautiful bits all combined into differing stories of what once was, divining in me new journeys and experiences to look forward to. A diary of images, my life in images, the therapy of releasing what I feel and experience onto the page and then cutting and pasting them into a new form of expression. It is piecing together my life through images.

Creating for me has always been about expressing the unsaid, an expression of emotions that are held inside when I can’t find the words to vocalize what I’m feeling. It is a time when I can process my emotions, my experiences. It is about having an expression of self that I’m either too shy or too embarrassed to express otherwise.

Drawing for me has always been an outlet, the pen a tool to express the inner workings of my mind. Untethered expression of emotion. With a pen and paper, I get lost in thought, endlessly thinking and processing what I’m feeling. Giving myself the opportunity to express myself where I may normally not feel comfortable to. The images become a manifestation of my emotions and of my dreams, it is my form of therapy. Often I become too consumed with emotion, my mind racing with thoughts too quick to even understand myself. I become stuck in there, lost in them. The pen becomes my vehicle for thoughts and emotions, giving me room to express myself when I often can’t find the words to share it.

Collaging has allowed me to create my own worlds to expand upon what is just expressed by my drawing and painting. To connect the stories told through images, assembling my thoughts which are reimagined through use of new imagery. Scissors are used to connect the stories, to connect my inner monologue, the inner workings of my mind. They become the tool for bringing the piece and bits of imagery to life. Both freeing and selective, they free the bits of the image I want to use, freeing it to becoming something else, a new story, selective in the sense that they define the parameters of the image, gives it borders, separating it from the whole it once was and giving it new life to become apart of something else. To hunt for images is also a meditative process, helping me to get clear with what it is I’m feeling, what I wish to see. It allows me to explore bits of different things created that speak to me, collecting bits I resonate the most with. Out of context the images are just literal meaning of what’s depicted and once glued and cemented into new imagery, it breathes new life in communication with the other images selected.

There are a multitude of meanings derived from one simple image. Using images to communicate is fun because it invites more abstraction, more opportunities for interpretation, freedom to be creative in using my voice. It’s exciting because my language of images still communicates different messages, evokes different subjective feelings for different people that interact with it. It brings me joy knowing that people can find their own bits of self in it as I share what’s usually kept private.

These processes uplift me to happiness and joyousness, a deepening of my understanding of myself. A lightness in being found by expressing myself. There is a joy to creating my own world on the page. Using drawing and collage as a form of a diary, I am cataloguing memories and experiences which serve as a sort of scrapbook. What is left aren’t only the stories I was thinking of at the time but a new form entirely, one that sparks joy from having reworked what was bothering me into something that I love, a new image that gives me strength and reassurance.

There is so much potential when you create, the potential to unravel ideas, explore emotions, to delve deeper into the self. When I collage, I am creating a collection of me and what I’ve been through stored in the stories behind what I create. My understanding of self deepens as I explore what it is I am feeling and experiencing and what it is I dream of— what it is I wish to see and want bring into my life, my hopes and dreams.

On the back I include either a poem or a short excerpt of what I’m feeling so I can better remember my headspace when I was working on a piece. Below is the text that goes along with the collage I’ve shared.

Today I felt that I was floundering. My legs going every which way trying to find my footing, the ground, something to stand on. I felt that my anxiety was so high and I worried that I would stay stunted in these feelings forever. That I would never get better, come out of it. That I’d always be searching for the ground, left to flutter around in these funny feelings forever. That people would always be laughing at me, criticizing me, that people would always be looking, judgmental of what I do, who I am, how I spend my time.

But then I remembered flowers, how they grow, their different stages. The eternal image of the phases of growth, of flourishing, of potential. Flowers beginning as buds, closed into themselves as they prepare to open, to bloom into their full potential. And this made me think that perhaps I am a flower too. Experiencing something that I will later leave behind as I grow into what I’ve always meant to be. And then in my anxiety, I found hope. Hope for the time when I’ll feel like my fullest self, with my roots firmly planted in the ground, my anxiety alleviated, a thing of the past.