IT'S SO FUN! But why is it so fun to me personally?
For a large portion of my life, I've struggled with control, especially the need to have security in my surroundings. My family life was a bit turbulent in my significant developmental years, and I always chose the safe, secure option for myself. I wanted to become an artist when I was 16, but I chose to go to community college and then university to study environmental politics and policy. I largely left behind my artistic practices during my undergraduate studies back in Maryland.
I moved to California to get my masters degree in 2022 and one night, I invited a friend to collage with some old national geographics my grandmother, Farmor meaning father's mother in norwegian, had given me. They were my grandfather's, and she held onto them for years. He passed away when I was 16... this is a theme in my family. We have trouble letting go of the physical manifestations of our memories. Everything can be a vehicle or portal to our nostalgia for a by-gone past. This resonates on both sides of the family.
Anyways, so I take these things my grandma was SUPER sentimental about at one point and I start cutting and ripping them up with my two friends! It came naturally to me - I hadn't lost my eye for composition after all these years of repressing my artistic spirit. I was immediately hooked by the process and the outcome. I adored the chance to relish in this old source material from years before I had ever walked this earth. And then I got to destroy them, cut them, tear them, in pursuit of my own reimagination of these images and words to create something entirely new. How cool is that?
I've been collaging ever since, and I believe in divine timing. I think collage found me in this perfect moment and it's lead me on a path to self discovery, towards confronting the collective family trauma that has resulted in lives driven by overaccumulation and this misguided need to find security in physical matter outside of oneself. Being a collage artist allows me to not only confront this trauma, but play with her. I am still actively accumulating source material in order to create! BUT I get to practice appreciation, detachment, and letting go in the name of creativity. HOW COOL IS THAT?!?!
Collage, at least photomontage collage, challenges artists to destroy in order to create.