creative practice

Collage as a way of seeing differently.

Collage is how I think. Pieces that don’t belong together, until they do. The same is true of lives in transition.

For me, it is one of the ways I make sense of things. We get stuck because we think we already know how it ends, and we try to plan every step before we take it. Collage takes that away. You don’t know the outcome until the last piece is down.

A collage on a white pad: a seated woman looks across a lake at a tall figure patterned in marbled colour, hills behind, with two pink dots and the cut words MORE PERSPECTIVE More perspective

You can’t think your way out of it.

We try to think our way out. Words everywhere. Podcasts in your ears on the walk, another self-help book by the bed.

Sometimes it is enough to stop. To run the experience and the feeling through your body, through your hands, and just make something. To let yourself not think, and only do.

That is often when something clicks.

In my head it looked completely different. Now I see there can be more than one perspective.

Client, mid-session

You lay the pieces down, step back, and the picture you were sure of holds more than one reading. That is usually where a decision starts.

the work
A dense, colourful collage of many small magazine fragments and cut words layered together
All at once
A cyanotype in deep blue with white botanical silhouettes, a single orange lily and a small seated figure
Still alive
A collage in a journal: a kraft envelope addressed TO: AUSTRALIA with Australian animal stamps, and a handwritten line, I am not shrinking myself to fit in
Not shrinking to fit
A collage of pale cut-paper letters over a blue cyanotype ground, the shapes never quite forming a word
Before words
A collage on white: a pink orchid and a small figure leaping out of a sturdy boot
Out of nowhere
A cyanotype of deep-blue bowls on a cream ground, arranged in a quiet rhythm
Room for it
A collage on white: warm orange and pink tissue-paper squares building upward around a single raised leg, with a cut line reading Happiness, a memoir
Happiness, a memoir
A collage on white: a Frida Kahlo portrait with flowers, a small figure and a frog spilling out where the top of her head opens, and a cut line reading And then I thought
And then I thought
A collage on white: a deep-blue painted ground with a torn map of Fiji and blue cellophane, and a small cut label reading FLOW
Flow
A collage: two women in purple saris ride bicycles along a coast above two strips of red FRAGILE packing tape, with a torn map fragment and a cut line reading over for the day
Fragile

You do not need to be good at this.

Most women who come to me are sure they are not the creative type. That is usually the first thing worth looking at. We are not making art. We are using it to see what words keep missing, and a stick figure works as well as anything.

And not every session has an image in it. I am a coach first. Sometimes we work with collage, a photograph, something in your hands, because some things do not show up in conversation. Sometimes we just talk. The work leads, the materials follow.

how this works

Where to start when you feel stuck.

These are my collages, not a service you book. But the way of working is the same one I bring to a session, and that you can book.

A first conversation is thirty minutes, free, nothing to prepare. We begin with whatever is on your mind, and you see whether the way I work fits the way you think.

Book the First Thread