Okay so, one of my biggest inspirations for making this website was the thesis project of graphic designer Rosemary Rae. She incorporated Emily Dickinson's poetry into collaged designs which then became the backdrop of her handbound thesis in which she explored Dickinson's innovative poetry, both in its format and content. The collages she made are AMAZING and inspired me to make this website in a collage-style. Her work has really helped me find my voice as a designer.

If you've been on any social media platform in the last 15 years, you're well aware of memes and how they work. In recent years, a certain type of meme made by millenials has gained popularity. The humor in these memes are not based on relateable experiences, politics, or clever wordplay. These memes are digital, purposefully haphazard collages of images from across the internet made into humorous compositions. They get copied and altered in a bizarre visual game of social media telephone. They can have such niche audiences that an outsider would have no idea how to interpret the mish mash of imagery and type. Much like the dada artists 100 years ago, the anxiety of current events results in a panicked attempt to find humor in a world where we are bombarded with bad news and tragedy. It seems only natural that when we see terrible things happening with no guarantee that we will prosper our humor would begin to reflect the perceived meaninglessness of life. So I guess when our world stops making sense, we collage. Go figure.

Bisa Butler is a Brooklyn-based artist who creates quilted portraits of everyday people which are incredibly colorful, gorgeous, and mesmerizing to look at. She uses fibers from Africa, which he considers to be her “ancestral homeland and the cradle of civilization.” SHe uses a range of materials from vintage lace to hand-painted mud cloth. Butler pieces together exquisite studies that honor black children, adults, and families that have been overlooked by history. “My portraits,” she explains, “tell stories that may have been forgotten over time.”

Raquel van Haver is an artist born in Bogota, Colombia in 1989 and currently resides in Amsterdam, although she travels all over the world. her work is loud, huge in scale, and delightfully maximalist. She is known primarily as a painter, winning the Dutch Royal Prize for Painting. However, she incorporates a wide variety of materials in her recent solo exhibition 'Spirits of the Soil'. This exhibition is inspired by the stories and people in West Africa and South America. The pieces explore themes of colonialism, imperialism, migration and diaspora and range widely in media. They are a mix of oil paint, charcoal, resin, hair, paper, photographs, tar, plastic bags, mobile phones, etc. This artist's range is insane and the piece pictured above is only a small representation of this exhibition.

Above is an example of a DIY craft with century-old origins. This is the junk journal made by Marina Blaukitchen. A place to keep scraps of paper packaging, old tickets, receipts, and other complete garbage that the owner of the journal may have emotional attachment to. This type of collage is starkly different from 1990s scrapbooking with neat lines and straight edges. Each page organized into themed pages. In fact, these journals feel very similar to Victorian scrapbooks. They are just a place to arrange and keep momentos without investing in any special paper, stamps, or tools. Maybe that's because it's hard to come by a scrapbooking store these days. It's interesting, because we now have the ability to store as many digital photos and videos as we want. And even so, there is a desire to have physical objects that we can hold in our hands. I think that's why I wanted to make all my collages by hand for this website. Because with all this coding and photoshop, there's something exciting about making designs with only the materials you have in front of you. Makes me feel a little like a quilting pioneer woman in Wisconsin. Weird, huh?