The Paper Garden.

On Collage and Loneliness.

There’s something uncanny about a collage—the way fragments, once severed from their source, take on new life in a different constellation. I started making them late one winter when the days felt clipped at both ends, folded into themselves like a letter unsent. The rooms I inhabited were quiet, too quiet, and I began to cut.

Loneliness, like collage, is made of remnants. It is not a clean emptiness but a clutter of presences no longer present. The ex-lover’s coat still on the hook. The echo of someone else’s footsteps, absorbed by the floorboards. I think of loneliness not as absence but as a palimpsest of former intimacies, overwritten but never quite erased.

Collage offers a kind of answer—not a cure, but a mode of cohabitation. I’d tear out images from old magazines: a woman’s hand resting on a glass of water, a bright blue parrot, a swatch of faded wallpaper. I didn’t know what I was looking for until it began to appear. A face, a shape, a small architecture of longing. It felt like speaking in a language that had no verbs, only textures.

In her eighties, the artist Mary Delany began her “paper mosaicks,” intricate botanical collages made from dyed tissue. She called it a “new art form,” and it emerged not in youth but in widowhood, when she found herself alone again after decades of marriage. Her flowers bloomed from grief. She made over a thousand of them.

There is a peculiar intimacy to the act of assembling scraps. It’s a slow stitching together of the world—what’s been lost, what’s been left behind. You are selecting, shaping, sometimes wounding an image to make it say something it didn’t before. In this way, collage becomes a form of autobiography: jagged, partial, revealing in its gaps.

Sometimes I think of my collages as little rooms I can enter. Not quite homes, but something proximate—a kind of shelter, albeit paper-thin. They let me dwell inside a feeling without being undone by it. And isn’t that what we ask of art? Not to banish loneliness, but to let it be seen, shaped, even shared.

Because what is loneliness, finally, if not the longing to be held in the gaze of another? And perhaps, just perhaps, in the act of arranging these scattered pieces, I am learning how to hold myself.

Thank you for reading, and you liked the collages featured in this post, then originals are for sale via my shop. But be quick, there is only one of each.