It’s funny how I tell friends old and new at
@colle.uk workshops that my analogue collage practice started at the beginning of 2024. But I now see how it actually started long before that.
As lost as I felt in 2023, in both my personal and professional life, I can see now how everything was realigning me to where my heart lay hidden, under all of the layers.
Growing up dyslexic in a society not constructed for non-linear thinking, I learned to control everything: how I looked, acted, spoke, just to feel like I belonged. The irony is, I was losing myself in the process.
I discovered I was a Type 1 on the Enneagram, the Reformer. It explained so much. The relentless self-correction. The need to get things right. The quiet fortress of coping mechanisms I’d built around myself over decades. Collage, it turns out, is a terrible place to be a perfectionist. And the most healing one.
Because you can’t control a torn edge. You can’t perfect a found image. And somewhere in the beautiful mess of it, all those suppressed ways of seeing, the non-linear, the instinctive, the playful, have slowly and steadily started to come undone. In the best possible way.
Through years of dogged stubbornness, showing up through university in my twenties, I found lighthouses, people who gave me permission to play like a child, to make a mess for the sake of curiosity and expression, to really make mistakes. All the ways I need to operate in order to grow, that I’d been denied during my adolescence and schooling. I’m forever grateful for those spaces, particularly at Solent, thanks to
@katherineanteney and
@katewatkinsart and to the people closer to home (you know who you are 💗). It taught me that safe creative spaces are worth more to my growth and my soul than any formal training or high-end materials ever could be.
For a year now I’ve been blessed to extend this to others, and I get more excited with every single workshop.
Whoever reads this, I wish you all the creative joy your heart has in store for you and more.
HAPPY WORLD COLLAGE DAY 2026 💛✂️
Your collaging cheerleader, Sarah 🚀
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#collageartist #analogcollage #collage #cutandpaste #worldcollageday
@kolajmagazine 
