World Collage Day Artist 2023

World Collage Day 2023:

I was deeply honoured to be chosen as the Kolaj Institute’s World Collage Day Artist 2023. World Collage Day takes place on the second Saturday of May every year. It is a global celebration of the practice of collage art and the rich vibrant communities which surround it.

For this project I was tasked with the creation of the World Collage Day Poster, Eight Postcards and the covers for Kolaj Magazine’s World Collage Day Special Edition 2023. I also met with the founder of the Kolaj Institute Ric Kasini Kadour at the outset to discuss potential themes and directions for the work itself. Existing within a post-pandemic, politically fractious and polarized environment, and with humanity facing multifarious global challenges; a primary theme that emerged was that of healing.

With healing in mind, I approached the project with an initial question of what does collage do?

As a Collagist and as a Psychotherapist, I often find myself using the language of integration. Engaged in an act of exploration while creating context and meaning. Seeking to reduce the sense of alienation among parts, interweaving experiences into something more whole.

As well as creating something playful, whimsical, beautiful, satirical or deeply reflective, which shares some part of ourselves with the world; Collage as a practice provides us with an opportunity to repeatedly, intentionally, engage with the act of sitting down, seeking and assembling things from different places into something that makes a new kind of meaning and sense?

As we move through our fractious contemporary reality: information overwhelm, social media trickery and increasingly polarized perspectives can seem to tear at the heart of our own perceptions of what is good, appropriate or even real. These divisive seeds of doubt, once sown, create disagreement, rifts, tensions, strife and even isolation within our relationships, communities and wider societies.

When I think about collage, I like to think about the reverse, an act of weaving meaning, of pulling disparate threads together. In this way I am struck that collage by its nature provides us with an important meditation on our time. It can take us down from our heads and the tumultuous whir of information overwhelm, into hands and into our senses. It can be a profoundly anchoring act.

This alchemy of meaning occurs through the loom of our own personal experiences, carried onwards by a process of play, serendipity, and a tolerance for the uncertainty of what may emerge. As an act collage invites us to hold a vital middle ground, to remain open, to navigate juxtapositions, disjunctions, conflicts, contradictions and clashes of context, as we seek to move towards understanding, and the creation of something meaningful and new.

For this reason, I chose a loom as the central image for the poster. In this way I am honouring the healing role of collage and the creative meaning making of the arts in the face of a complex and fractured global society.

I envisaged the post cards as separate images representing some of the fraught and divisive issues that we are navigating as a global society, but they can also be arranged around the poster in a circle to place the loom at the centre, pulling together into a larger composition.

To simply celebrate the joy of pulling together, rather than pulling apart.