I recently posted a series of collages to my Instagram stories. I hadn’t collaged in years, but when the pandemic started, I decided to take it up again. Sort of as a self-care practice and sort of because it’s a fun artsy thing you can do while drinking a beer.
In the months since, I’ve realized I like collaging. A lot. I like going through my old magazines. I like cutting out shapes and sentences and dumping them onto my table. I like shuffling through the decontextualized words and searching for the characters and narrative that will bring them together.
I like looking for the story.
It took me a while to realize this storytelling element was why collaging, as a specific artistic practice, appealed to me. I’m a words person, so most of my collaging is cutting and pasting together different sentence-bits. But I think the same principle could apply to image-based collages, too. Whether words or sketches or photos, collaging is all about taking disparate pieces and weaving them together to make something new. It’s telling a story through mismatch, contradiction, and juxtaposition. And reveling in the strangeness that sparks from this friction.
In this particular project––which anyone who follows me on Instagram has already been subjected to; sorry guys––a bunch of random words, sentences, and images became a story about a character’s dramatic-yet-healing love affair with a ghost. This was inspired by a New York Times article about people who believed they were quarantining with ghosts at the beginning of the pandemic. And also by the brilliant Nova Ren Suma and Elizabeth Hooks, both of whom gave thought-provoking lectures about ghost stories during my time at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Here’s “Ghost Collage,” followed be few story insights that shed light on why it…actually kinda works.
So, “Ghost Collage” is a little disjointed and a lot quirky. If I were going to do anything further with this project, it would definitely need some work. But I’m happy with the way I was able to use story structure to craft this collection of random odds and ends into some sort of sense. The narrator states their desire––“I just want people to like me”––as well as their attraction to the ghost. The desires appear to be in conflict at some level; “many people” think this whole ghost-sex thing is a bad idea. That inner conflict becomes an engine propelling the narrative onward. There’s a falling out, a reconciliation, and finally, a celebration. For all the bizarre little details along the way, it basically plays out like a Disney film.
Well, if Disney were cool with “toppling the patriarchy.” (We’ll get there. Maybe?)
All this to say: collaging can be a form of storytelling, and also, it’s great for the same reason stories are great. It’s a tool to make order from chaos and meaning from randomness.
So––my story tip this week? Go make some art. Go make some meaning. And see what happens next.
Happy storytelling,
Erin
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Erin Becker (she/her)
Writer | Communications Consultant | Storytelling Expert
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