Artist Statement
The function of these three bodies of work is to fabricate and document the mental and physical process I experienced while digging deeper into collage therapy work in my own practice. The process began with creating the physical collage with various paper images, then producing the oil painting of that collage. The final piece is the evaluation’s collage, which documents the entire process from the collage construction to the painting. I referenced a specific professional Art Therapist approach to create my collage from Susan Buchalter’s book Art Therapy and Creative Coping Techniques for Older Adults called “Thinking Out of the Box”. I created something out of the ordinary, with no limitations to my experimental creativity, and that something became a self-portrait fabricated from different patterns and images I found during my collage building process. After learning how prominent collage therapy is in the art therapy world, it inspired my deeper exploration in collage as a therapeutic form that artists, like myself, generally look past while creating. There is a lot more going on in our subconscious as collage creator’s than we comprehend on the immediate surface, and that subconscious should always be deeper explored to gather the true meaning of your work. This body of work helped me connect on a deeper subconscious level with myself, opening my eyes to why collage resonated so deeply with me as an artist during my collegiate career.
