On the power of collage

This month in Journal with me – my subscription-based creative journaling membership – we are making collages in our journals with the specific intention to uplift, inspire and motivate. We meet this Thursday to cut stuff out from magazines; stamp things on scrap paper; and find ephemera that speaks to our specific lives and projects. Later in February we’ll make collages with what we have amassed. I’ve called this month “planting bulbs in our journals”; it’s a metaphor I chose because in my experience the collaging process lays rich foundations of daydreaming, imagining and envisioning that help our dreams to bloom. I’m so excited about this creative focus on intentional collaging, and wanted to write about how I got here.

It started last year when I did a collage class locally, and realised the uplifting power of putting together images to express a mood; to speak to a theme; to consolidate an intent.

I deeply enjoyed the whole process of sifting through images and words and working in such a tactile way. I found solace in seeding images of hope, softness and gentleness across the emotional landscape of loss and grief. The collage I made after Mel died has sat in our bedroom ever since, transmitting a soothing atmosphere that is more than the sum of its parts. It speaks to an imaginary place where bears sleep in flowers; people care for one another; new life is constantly being planted and nurtured: it is a great comfort.

Since making that collage I’ve made more – mostly in my journal – to mark other moments and thresholds; to process feelings, memories and experiences; to get ideas out in a messy, material way. Each time I’ve found it profoundly useful for sorting out feelings and ideas – and an important analogue antidote to an increasingly digital world.

Collage cannot be created by AI. AI doesn’t have a human imagination that can form associations and memories in connection with scraps of paper. It doesn’t know the difference between any old shell image and the rubber stamp you carved the first time you identified a sting winkle. That the cowrie shell is your magic talisman ever since your friend Caroline showed you how to find one on Sandwick beach in Shetland. That you never got over the thrilling discovery that they occasionally wash up in St. Leonards, too. That some of the paper used in a collage might be wrapping paper – coloured tissue; zebra party paper; special giftwrap created by a jeweller in The Scillies for wrapping their wares.

But we know about these things; we have those layers of human experience. We know that making a collage is not just about making an image.

This collage marked my last birthday as the beginning of my Soft Nerd Era. It represents a year in which I felt slowed and softened by grief; enthralled by the sea’s rich stores of shells and treasures; and newly-outlined to myself as an Autistic person with ADHD (re: zebras / neurodiversity). All these messy bits coalesce in the whole of the Soft Nerd Era collage and it has shored me up through dismantling my business and navigating the loss of my hand-knitting / knitwear-designing career: “I’m not failing; I’m entering my Soft Nerd Era”.

I could have created a painting, but then how could I have included the stamps I carved, the chance palette of gift-wrap? Collage lets us incorporate the ephemera of our lives; the layers of memory and association; our messy collections of STUFF. I can’t trust that painter Felix would have had the clever idea to do zebras with party hats and tutus – nor known how much I needed them.

In Journal with me we talk a lot about how our journals serve us, and it’s come up a few times that some folk don’t enjoy creating a calendar as they arrange their lives digitally. I get that. But for me setting up the month is not just about making a calendar. It’s also an important act of scene-setting; a mood-check, if you will. For November I created a collage to demonstrate another way of representing the month ahead. My images foreground the workshops I was giving that month for Journal with me (Send more love letters / Planning for the holidays); a slew of health appointments; a newfound enthusiasm for eating protein (BEANS BEANS BEANS!); and dancing and movement as lighthouses in dark times. The collage also reflects the rainy weather, the presence of the sea, and the ever-magic snail and EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH talismans that keep me going through all badness and dismay.

I can’t tell you how much better November was on account of this collage. The rainy days mixed with the washi rain drop stickers in my imagination; the magic hands holding wands, sparks and lit matches informed my everyday creative interventions; glittery foot stickers echoed my real beach-dancing feet.

I taught quite a few journaling classes through December on the theme of reviewing your year – one for my school and one for Modern Daily Knitting. Preparing for these workshops meant going back through my phone and all the photos from 2025; I vividly relived a lot of sad stuff. Yet I also remembered how many times last year I went to the sea and cried, and danced, and laughed. And how, even though it was a sad year, it was also a year full of love.

There was profound joy in discovering movement and exercise after a lifetime of “not being sporty”; healing beach discos where you can come as you are, and dance as you feel, without judgement; the presence of the sea that is so big and so powerful that you can take any feelings to it and know they will just be folded away into its waves. There was getting our new cats, Elmo and Oscar, and being a full family again. Making this collage helped me see 2025 in a more whole way, to remember all the joy. When I look at it now, I think about that beautiful thing Andrea Gibson says in Come see me in the good light; I can’t remember the precise words but they say something like “what if all these feelings – the sadness, the fear, the loss, the grief, the pain – are just love”?

This collage reminds me of that. I wrote on it that 2025 was “a year lived heart wide open”…” and it really was.

Carving my own stamps means meaningful images can appear infinitely in collages. The cowrie, the mermaids purse, the seal (of approval), hearts and thank-yous, beans. For my Modern Daily Knitting class, I created printable images using hand-carved rubber stamps. We cut out the printables and stuck them in our journals to use as prompts for writings and reflections.

At the start of January, remembering how happy November’s collage had made me, I created a new one for the incoming month and put it beside my health habit tracker.

When I go to my fitness class and we are instructed to skip, it is this horse that I think about, surrounded by instances of the word PROTEIN cut from the ALDI brochure; peanuts cut from a printed kraft paper bag and jarring slashes of neon tape. I made this collage to remind me how much I enjoy feeling like a horse – all big and thundering and strong; that I love eating peanut butter; that going to the beach gives me a special inner resource. This collage inspired me to eat more protein in January: it also made me feel happier and more mischievous about doing so, and created a layer of story in the everyday acts of doing my weights, preparing food, moving my body.

I barely went to the sea in January, though, so my February collage has much more SEA in it. An oyster that is also a mountain; kidney beans and eggs; flowers, crystals and water. It is full of rich reminders that mean something to me about caring for my body, cherishing the place where we live, and keeping my creative fires burning. The compass refers to all the things that bring me back to myself when I fear I have lost my way.

Last Monday night, feeling too glum about the darkness and the rain to go outside, I felt like I needed to still somehow live in the spirit of this collage. I stuck my headphones on and vacuumed the entire house while listening to drum and bass. I was inspired by the glorious female figure here, lit up with creative fires, surrounded by wishes and beans. I also searched around online for a cheap secondhand dryrobe and a rain hat with a brim because, as my friend Catherine says, “there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes”. But I feel like the collage made me do it.

And that is the point – and the power – of collage. Whether the project is to eat more protein, get out of the house more, or to mark a birthday or the turn of the year, collage lets us tell our stories out loud, outrageously, out of stuff.

I’m so happy to have found another way that I can use my hands to celebrate daily life.

A little language of motifs and stamps is growing in my journal and the more I use my beans, sparks and matches… my compass, seal and snails… the more they embed themselves in my consciousness. There’s a reason why advertisers spend millions of pounds making sure we see the same images over and over and over again, and perhaps what I love most of all about collage and journaling is how these activities take me away from the lure of the doom-scroll and the persistence of corporate logos and the omnipresence of digital surveillance. Collage lets me reimagine the world. It lets me take its vacuous magazine page perfume ads and turn them into dreams of healing and repair. Collage makes my own voice louder, so I can remember who I am.

This time last year I decided my word for 2025 was DOUBT. It was a good word for 2025 but this year I have a new one: POWER. Not the power of billionaires, or the power of weapons, or the power of resource-hoarding – all of which are currently destroying everything that is dear and precious in this world – but the power of imagination. The power of hope. The power of creating. The power of love. We can share it, we can inspire it in one another, we can glue it in our journals one determined messy little piece of joy at a time. These are not just pretty pictures in journals; that is the power of collage.