Collage

Collage, assemblage, bricoleur - all terms refer to the process of bringing materials together in a creative process. In the spirit of “making do,” one uses the materials at hand to imagine and create. The possibilities are endless, the product of an imagination which connects seemingly disparate items together into an emergent viewpoint. I’ve included examples of stichomancy which refers to divination through randomly opening a page from a book or article and then including the random phrases into a word poem. I may be stretching it a bit to think of these as collage - but in some ways my experience of stichomancy translates into a collage of interwoven thoughts and ideas.

I like collage and stichomancy because they’re accessible to all with access to articles, books, images and a glue stick. Simply find three images, glue them on a piece of paper and voila you have collage. Or randomly select lines from an article and glue them to a page in the order randomly selected. One of the examples is to take a page from a book, randomly select words that stand out to you, blacking out the remaining text. My point here isn’t to diminish the complexity of collage but to instead provide encouragement for the person who is thinking ”I can’t do this” to think maybe they can play a little…

Attended a sublime collage workshop facilitated by Maria Mendoza of Joy Collage ~ Self portrait, active imagination brought forth: "Rooted in the earth, you hold space for your frenetic mind to imagine.”