My Love of Collage

I love to collage. I always have. I am not a great artist (I have twice been told that my “drawings” look like a young child made them) but with magazine images I can create something visually pleasing and therapeutically healing.

Disclosure: I am not an art therapist and I do not practice art therapy with my clients; however there are creative ways to process our pain and hope that are visual and stream of consciousness. 

Why Collage for Healing?

I have been using collage as a way to process my own inner goolash for many years. Prior to the pandemic, I used collage with clients in in-person sessions to process trauma or a dream or give something a more dimensional and visual experience. Telehealth has changed some of that but for my own processing my go to is collage, complete with magazines, scissors, and a glue stick. 

I joined a Facebook collage group at the beginning of 2021 after many years of collaging solo. The founder of the group, Shelley Klammer, is a therapist and expressive arts educator and has many wonderful art courses available. She provides a list of 52 healing collage prompts and then participants share their work on the private page. I have really enjoyed the act of having a prompt to guide the feeling and creation and then a place to share the result and get to see other people’s creations. A few examples of the prompts and my results:  

Tender:

“I don’t have any magazines!”

I am old school and use magazines (I have a huge collection and I am constantly adding to it) but if you don’t have magazines there are digital collage media apps, such as Freemix. I have NOT used any of them, so I cannot give you an assessment however the other participants seem to like the process as much or more. I really like the physical experience of using paper. 

Asking people for their old magazines is totally acceptable, most people want to give them away! I went on Nextdoor and asked for National Geographics and a wonderful neighbor gifted me a HUGE box of them that I am still working my way through. Other good collage magazines include Vanity Fair, New Yorker, W, Interview, Vogue, Bazaar, Outdoor and architectural and fashion magazines. Goodwill often has magazines for sale. I love anything that has nature and animals, strong emotions, details, illustrations, and interesting images of people. I go for the dark images as much as the beautiful ones. I love shadows, eyes, movement, joy and sadness. 

I have the supplies, now what?

Sometimes I feel really confused about a situation or experience and I might even feel stuck in how to process it. Perhaps I have talked it over and over and nothing has shifted for me. Collage is the place I will usually turn next. I will often sit quietly before beginning to pull images and get in touch with the feeling or experience I am having. An example of early on in the pandemic, when I was feeling a lot of fear and anxiety:

I have also done a few about myself, the Things I Love About Me, All the Parts of Me, Reset and Retreat. I don’t always know the name of the final result, but usually there is a feeling and as I go through the magazines, I look for images that call to me or represent the feeling somehow. It doesn’t have to make sense, I try not to overthink it, and that’s the beauty of the process. Usually they are complete in 15-30 minutes, because in some ways they are creating themselves, the images call to be used and then I organize and glue while in a calm peaceful state. Often times emotions show up and I do my best to sit with the discomfort of the emotion until it passes, where I can witness it in the creation of a collage and feel it dissipate from my psyche. 

This is called Reset and its how I have been feeling since the beginning of Spring and taking some time off for me, as a reset from the winter, covid and all the stressors we have been experiencing this year.

Collage Vision Boards

Lots of people like to collage vision boards. I think it’s a great way to get your hopes, desires and dreams into a visual format. I recently created a collage about where I hope to live one day, complete with open space, water, lots and lots of trees, freedom and peace. 

If you are interested in collaging or want to join the Facebook group, drop me a note or request an invitation on Facebook. There are plenty of ways to start engaging with this medium immediately even if you don’t have the actual magazines by using a digital app. Or share your collage here on this page!

Good luck and happy collage making!