Collage Art

I am a collage artist, psychotherapist, writer, and  Associate Professor at Touro College Graduate School of Social Work where I teach clinical social work practice and Arts Intervention in Social Work Practice. I hold a certificate from Adelphi University in Creative Arts Practices for Mental Health Professionals.

This is a collage series of intuitive digital collages inspired by my dreams and by an intuitive digital collage challenge in 2019. I have been creating mixed media collages and digital collages for many years, but I noticed I rarely share them. This year, I decided to change this. I  participated in two faculty art exhibits at Touro College, and to share them here in Creavado.

Creating collages has always been my creative safe place, it is in creating them that I connect to a deeper part of myself, or to the many parts within me. it is there that I converse with these parts and process emotions and life events, their gifts come in images. 

As an artist-researcher, my aim was to gain a deeper understanding of the process of daily collage art-making. The creation of these collages became a way of seeing myself creating art while simultaneously researching my experience.

Through journaling, and dreamwork, I found this to be a transformative journey of self-awareness, and self-discovery, coming home to self. The daily act of making collage led to a deeper understanding of my multiple identities as a social worker who is also an artist, researcher, teacher/therapist. In A/r/tography the visual, and the written are living practices of art-making, researching, and teaching (Irwin, et.al, 2006). Finding A/r/tography supported this understanding as it provided a foundation from which my multiple identities and my creative process could be understood.

Soon, I discovered that the collage art-making process became a metaphor for my life, for who I am, an individual with multiple identities as a social worker who is also an artist, researcher, teacher as well as a therapist. Through collage making and research, I found a home in A/r/tography as a methodology that gave me the understanding of how I live my life which is creative as an artist, researcher, teacher/ therapist, and how these identities enhance each other.

In A/r/tography, the “A” represents the artist, “r” represents the researcher, and the “t represents the teacher, the slashes in between A/r/t remind us that the artist, researcher, teacher/therapist are equal identities that coexist simultaneously. Finding A/r/tography allowed me to understand my roles as an artist, researcher, and teacher/therapist in the process of art-making through collage. It gave me an understanding of how I live my life creatively, how the artist, the researchers, the teacher, and the therapist are interrelated supporting each other through the act of art-making.

I am the author of My Daughter’s Eyes and Other Stories, winner of the Marmol prize for first Latina fiction (2007). My poems and short stories have appeared in various periodicals. I write all of the time, but when I am not writing or publishing, I am taking my time to process a story and I do this through art. Then I wait to find a home for my story, a home that will love it. 

Irwin, R.L., Beer, R., Springgay, S., Grauer, K., Xiong, G. and Bickel, B. (2006). The Rhizomaatic Relations of A/r/tography. Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research in Art Education, 49(1),