At the end of February, I embarked on yet another creative trek as part of Kening Zhu’s labyrinth community. The practice that I chose for this trek was minimalist collage (maximum 2-5 pieces of paper).
Keeping it minimalist was important to me, because I’ve tried collage before but got so carried away with adding so many pieces that I ended up never doing it again. Plus, my favourite collage artists (Vanessa Saba and Katrien de Blauwer) have a minimalist style, so I want to try creating from their perspective.
My guiding question: can I distill what I want to express into only 3 pieces of paper?
My intentions with this trek
My main intention for this trek is to explore my creative voice. To better understand what I have to say as an artist, and how I could say it through collage.
My second intention is to get to know collage as a medium. I’ve always felt a pull towards collage, and i want to see if it could be something i develop a deeper relationship with and becomes part of my regular practice.
My third intention is pragmatic: I’m designing printed clothing, and the way I’d lay out design elements on a shirt is compositionally the same as collaging. So I want to practice it.
Initial thoughts
I’ve tried analog collage before and though I love the feeling of paper, I dislike the feeling of cutting or pasting. So my intention was to try digital collage in Photoshop, while leaving the option to switch back to analog if I feel like it.
Because adding Photoshop to the mix could quickly turn into a deep technical rabbit hole, Kening gave me a suggestion of no gluing. What if it were an ephemeral collage, like a mandala? This had never occurred to me, and I loved the idea! It reminded me of this one collage I saw and loved, which I later realized was just a stack of papers that the artist photographed. So I’m allowing myself any and all forms of collage for this trek: analog, digital, or ephemeral.
My trekking logs
Monday, February 23rd [in Toronto, at my parents’ house]
I did the non-gluing analog collage today, and I love how accessible it is! I even did it while in bed and barely tore any paper, mostly rearranging pieces and then using my phone camera as the frame. It’s amazing how the framing changes everything, turning a pile of papers into an artwork. It was also surprisingly hard to keep it under 5 papers! The constraint made it so much more enjoyable. Being at my parents’ house also limited my options, so I used some old photos which gave it this lovely vintage vibe. I think I will steal some photos to bring back to NYC!
Wednesday, February 25th [in Toronto, at my parents’ house]
today i’m taking more time on getting the composition “just right”. after deciding which papers i want in the collage, i’m tweaking it bit by bit until it speaks to me. in the past i didn’t even know what (visual) artists meant when they said a piece “speaks to them”, but now I realize there’s a clear difference in a composition that makes my heart flutter vs one that does not. and even more surprising is that sometimes the difference between them is the tiniest little detail.
Monday, March 2nd [back home in NYC from here on]
i’ve been thinking a lot about artistic expression and what it means to truly study, love, and devote yourself to an art form. you notice all the little nuances of that art, and the tiniest detail makes or breaks it for you (this is 100% true for me in dance).
i’ve been approaching my visual art with a shallow, aesthetic-focused lens of “does this look good” instead of a truly passionate, logic-defying lens of “does this make me feel something”. I wasn’t sure what “feel something” meant in response to a visual piece (compared to my response to music, for example, which is very visceral and immediate for me).
my trip back home helped me realize I DO actually know what it means to feel something towards a visual artifact, and it’s different from being moved by music. it is more a sense of wonder/magic combined with safety/belonging, like my inner child being both held and enchanted. back in nyc, i’m approaching collage with this new lens.
- I’m trying traditional (glued) collage because i wanted a finished piece that I could hold in my hand
- the actual pieces of paper are important — choose papers that actually mean something or stir something in me, not just random magazine clippings that look cool. this can be framed as a constraint, which I know from previous sessions are enjoyable and helpful.
- the “feeling something” starts with the papers, combined with compositions that make my heart flutter as mentioned last session
Tuesday, March 3rd
I was looking for some guidance/class that could help me explore collage in this deep, psychic way but also in a minimalist style, and I couldn’t find one so I used Claude AI to generate a curriculum for me to follow. It helped me slow down and be really intentional about what pieces I cut out and equally intentional about how they’re put together — I must’ve tried 20 different compositions of these 3 pieces of paper! I love how slow and deliberate this “class” forced me to go.
the next “lesson” is about including more of my photography/calligraphy/other arts (one benefit of an AI curriculum is being able to hyper-tailor it to what I want)
Wednesday, March 4th
I worked much faster and deliberated less today, not sure if it was because I worked with my own photos and had more obvious response to it, or if I’m honing my felt sense/bodily reaction to the papers.
Saturday, March 7th
There are actually 2 distinct creative processes happening in collage: choosing fragments and creating compositions. the former is about reduction and stripping down to the essential, the latter is about expansion and building. it helps me to keep them completely separate.
Going with my first gut instinct on both choosing papers and making compositions suits me much more than heavy deliberating. even though trying all combinations of papers/compositions was a great exercise in honing my eye and necessary to learn my own style, the way I naturally create is much more intuitive. and I feel like I’ve “exercised” enough to rely on my intuition now.
Reflections on the trek: a mirror for my artistic journey
It is amazing to witness my artistic development throughout this trek, not just in the medium of collage, but as a visual artist on the whole. In the beginning, there was just a tiny spark, this feeling that collage could teach me something, without knowing what exactly. By the end, I developed a whole new understanding of what it meant for a piece of visual art to “speak to you”. It sounds silly to say this, as a visual artist. Isn’t that why you got into visual arts in the first place, because it spoke to you? Well, no.
The reason I got into visual art was, similar to this collage trek, because I felt that initial spark. That slight tugging feeling of “there’s something here to explore, that might help you get closer to yourself.” But I had no idea what that something was.
It was so easy then, to simply look at art that I thought was pretty, and try to emulate it by learning their techniques. In other words, I worked from the outside in. I thought about how I wanted to my art to look like at the end, and then made a plan to get myself there.
Classic mistake, from the analytical mind of a former engineer. In the tech, corporate, and capitalistic world, this is exactly how you are taught to do things: set a goal, make a (linear) plan, and execute the steps. BUT SELF EXPRESSION DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT!
Self expression works from the inside out. You start by feeling into what’s going on on the inside: your emotional landscape, your longings, your doubts, your fears, your hopes. And THEN, you find ways and learn techniques to express it into the external world.
This requires a lot of attention and patience, two things that are increasingly rare in our chronically-online, social-media-addicted society. This collage trek forced me to really look, to really see, to notice the details. It honed my perception by enforcing slowness and stillness. And a whole world opened up to me once I stopped running.