ONE YEAR OF DAILY COLLAGES IN QUARANTINE

Today marks one year of doing these daily collages in quarantine. I started making them a week into staying home as something relaxing to do in the afternoon. As things really shut down and my then first grader son was doing school from home, I no longer had any time of my own. All my other creative outlets took up too much time or brain space that I didn’t have the bandwidth for. The daily routine of these was manageable and engaging enough creatively to keep me going. Most days, I was able to carve out an hour for myself in the afternoon to sit down and cut out paper, drink coffee and paste a collage together. As it became more of a daily routine it became clear that it was a form of self care that carried me along the days and helped me feel more grounded during such traumatic times.

After a week or so of doing them on different loose paper, my husband gave me one of these composition books he had ordered in bulk. I really only thought I would fill part of one…

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Stacks of paper on paper, I love the bits that jut out of the edges and how they change the compositions as you move though the book.

experimentation

It’s been fun incorporating stop motion into my daily collage. Now that I’m getting a hang of it, I can add techniques that I’ve been using for years in my photos. I was lucky that when I took my first photography class in high school (the mid-90’s) they were only teaching analog photography. I think learning about taking images (pre_digital) was such a blessing because you had to be creative and do everything in-camera, you couldn’t just slap a filter on it or use photoshop. It taught me to be selective, creative and really look at things and see through a view-finder. I’ve always been very picky about cropping and think it should be minimal, think about the image before you capture it. This informed me so much more than the fifteen year old me would ever know. Experimenting with image-making has always been what draws me into photography.

collages + February 8 - 14

I’ve started making a stop motion as I make my collage each day. I really need to breathe new life into it. Maybe instead of doing a weekly update here I’ll try to combine the collage with the stop motion side-by-side, daily. I haven’t made many changes this site in so long and it really needs a lift! It’s daunting to start making changes and break things in the process. But, that’s all part of the process.

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