Paper Collages

Like most of my other art projects, I had difficulty starting this one. The amount of choices was overwhelming and I couldn’t decide what I wanted to convey. I started by playing with materials. Newspaper pieces were easy to arrange and layer. I also enjoy the old, discolored look of the paper. While ripping, certain words stuck out to me like “budget,” “activist,” and “why,” so I ripped them out and started making a word pile. All of these words started to make me think about politics and the crazy amount of negativity we have to intake right now and it made me feel a disconnect between my body and my thoughts. I arranged the word pile in many different ways on a small square of beige paper until it took on the shape of a thought bubble. I then created a “person” out of unidentifiable newspaper rippings whose limbs and head were floating slightly away from the torso. I outlined the thought bubble in red to draw the eye to the importance and power thoughts can have.

For my second collage, I had a much clearer idea of what I wanted to do. My first collage left me feeling like I wasted too much time thinking negative thoughts. I wondered what else wasted my time? The train, while calming and pleasant to ride (also a great place to get work done) consumes 3 and a half hours of my day. I cut strips of old metro north train passes and created a series of clocks against a piece of rectangular black construction paper.

My final collage started a lot different than the end product. I began this piece wanting to make a mirror. The previous pieces had a connection: in one time is wasted thinking about consuming thoughts and in the other time is wasted by train travel. For my third piece, I wanted to comment on time wasted worrying about what you look like. I found paper that had various color patches on it. I ripped it into piece to make it look even more broken and used that to create the actual mirror. Originally the background was a bunch of strips of two varying patterned papers. I wanted to cover more of the brown paper, and decided to cover the whole background in purple tissue paper. The blue in the middle was made from blue tissue paper layered with glue many times over. I wanted the paper to appear cloudy to mimic the cloudiness your eyes feel after looking at something for too long.