My collages are a map through my subconscious, both in terms of process and content. As a person with multiple disabilities, I live in an alternate reality of how to make desire, physical limitations, and necessity coalesce into something beyond mere adaptational survival into a thing of wonder that even in its sometimes (absurdly) tragic moments, transcends to a bizarre crescendo of wisdom, joy, and mystery. I work with a variation of automatic writing in images, which I come by through free-associating on literal, aesthetic, metaphorical, and allegorical levels. I then combine and recombine until I have “completed the circle” and associated back to the original image or concept. I have physical limitations on how much art in traditional mediums I can do (not to mention budget and space limitations), so I mostly work digitally, and came to collage as a way to adapt from more physically demanding work, as I do in my mundane life. Necessity is the mother of the extraordinary. 

I live a magpie life, which lends itself to collage as a medium. I look at the “big picture,” and then pick and choose from various models until I can work around the parts I can’t do. Such is collage as well. The creation of a life or work through the liminal spaces that exist between what is “supposed” to be possible or true and what actually is are where discovery begins, and the creation of new worlds and ways of being become possible. 

Layering images of contradictory truths as a narrative, sometimes using actual words in “quasi-calligrams,” opens up new possibilities that may never have come to fruition had there not been limitations in place. As such, the limitation forms a paradoxical conduit to continual discovery. In the tradition of memory palaces, understanding magically changes reality.

I also blur the line between art and politics, both with my social practices projects and as part of the political process itself in an effort to create a more collaborative society where worth is not predicated on market value or damage in the service of power.