About
My collage making started as part of a poetry project. Playing with writing poems in a collaged format, I set out to create visual collages that translated as poems to accompany the words—so, poems as collages and collages as poems. I had also recently become keeper of our old family photo albums and found myself pouring over photos of my grandparents and great grandparents, great aunts and uncles, cousins in various categories of removal and my parents in their youth, wondering about their hopes and dreams and all of the “what-ifs” and forks in the road not taken. With scissors and glue, a mishmash of found images from the public domain and commercial sources, my own photography and the old photos of my relatives, the collages started to tell an entertaining alternative version of my own family history. Instead of poems, they became small visual stories, animating my ancestors in ways they might never have imagined but hopefully might have enjoyed at least half as much as I have.
From that starting point, I began to incorporate vintage and contemporary portraits in the public domain, exploring the narrative of imaginary lives influenced by personal mythology, fairytales, tarot and the metaphysical.
Teaching myself to work digitally opened up possibilities of nuanced, multiple layering and the ability to creatively manipulate images into the visual stories I want to present.