Anna Forrester

I first experimented with collage as a landscape architecture grad student: we used it in our concept images, renderings, sections and perspectives to explore ideas for a project or design, and to convey a sense of how a visitor might experience a proposed space.

Nowadays, when I collage, it’s probably the process more than the product that keeps me coming back to the scrap-covered table in my otherwise uninviting basement. I love the mental zone I find myself in when I’m leafing through magazines and books and other paper ephemera, snipping and tearing and moving pieces around. The flow of the work is relaxing and generative.

Technique-wise: I’m a bit of a slave to the ex-acto knife, and am trying to get more comfortable with less clean edges, and with loosening up with paint, gesso, etc. When I head down the stairs to that table, I typically don’t have a plan. I sit down and start flipping pages and sorting through scraps. An image or bit of type gets snagged on some idea or thought that’s been swirling around in my monkey mind and I end up exploring it through collage. Birds have been fluttering into a lot of my collages lately, as have images related to activities long considered “women’s work”.

I love the serendipity of both the starting points and the places where the work takes me. And sometimes I like the collages I end up with too.