“Who knows their own story? Certainly it makes no sense when we are living in the midst of it. It's all just clamor and confusion. It only becomes a story when we tell it and retell it. Our small precious recollections that we speak again and again to ourselves and to others, first creating the narrative of our lives and then keeping the story from dissolving into darkness.”
― Nick Cave
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Her route in wasn't through animation at all, but collage. A teenage obsession with Hannah Höch's photomontages and Terry Gilliam's cut-out sequences led her to turn mismatched body parts into little monsters and try to make them move. That was way before she had the software or the skills to do it properly. She taught herself the rest – and it shows in the loose way she works. - How Sara Priorelli distorts bodies to laugh off the awkwardness of having one - via Creative Boom
I love collage as a medium because it allows me to suggest things without necessarily being too prescriptive. I can add patterns that are very typical for Yoruba people or be really suggestive of how people interact with each other. I think as a black artist, it can be easy to be too overt with what my work means as a way of translating it to a non-black audience, but I find collage helps me be a little obscure. It feels as though black people are in on the joke in a way, the joke being how we move within our identity. - Collaging Diaspora: Fiyin Oluokun on Black Life in Contemporary Ireland - via Art Africa
"It's easy to do, yet difficult to do well," Pollard tells Rolling Stone of the collage medium. "It's my favorite. I've never tried anything else, really. The end result of a collage can be surprisingly rewarding considering the time it took to build it." - Robert Pollard’s Inner World - via Rolling Stone
A well known curator once said that the problem with collage was that it’s too easy to make a decent one, while it’s almost impossible to create something great. Whether or not I am misremembering or paraphrasing I am not sure. But collage seems easy, and the fact that it lends itself to exercises in graphic design certainly does not help. - Cut Out - via Conscientious
Jana studied Fine Art, with a focus on sculpture and ceramics, but the physical demands of the medium made it difficult to sustain while moving frequently. Collage offered a way forward due to its portability and immediacy, while still allowing her to think spatially and construct worlds. Over time, those instincts towards scale reasserted themselves. "The collage work started expanding into physical space," she explains, "into sets and installations – almost like returning to sculpture, but through a different language." - How Jana Frost uses collage and set-building to explore time, symbolism and the subconscious - via Creative Boom
Johnson—the inscrutable collagist and mail artist—is part Rauschenberg, part Darger. Part insider, part outsider. It’s been possible in recent years to see a wide range of Johnson’s work in New York. There was an exhibition at the Morgan Library that focused on Johnson’s late use of photography—which took in a lot of his other mature work as well—and one at the Craig Starr Gallery that showcased his surviving Bauhaus-inspired paintings and traced his movement into assemblage and collage. - Ray Johnson and the Iron (John) Cage - via 3 Quarks Daily
After capturing everything on his camera roll, the process from there is layered and purposefully messy. He draws on his iPad – "my sketches are usually very chaotic; honestly, I'm probably the only person who can fully understand them" – and thinks about composition and movement simultaneously, since animation is central to his work. He digs into his archive of vintage magazines for collage elements, then builds the 3D composition on screen, letting colour, texture and pattern develop intuitively once the structure is in place. - Pedro Nekoi makes surreal, saturated worlds from traffic cones, vintage magazines and Tokyo backstreets - via creative Boom
A selection of challenge submissions from last week is up on our website and can be seen here, the image prompt for next week is available to download here
Our 2026 Workbook is out and available for sale on our website. Our weekly creative challenge remains free and open to everyone and everything, digital or analog artists, French or not. The workbook is an optional add-on for those who prefer to work with paper and don’t want to print our images themselves. Like every year, the book is designed so that you can either take it apart or create your collages in the book itself. Week numbers and image sources are on the back of each image, so even if your books falls apart at one point, you will always know what’s what!
If you have any news about exhibitions, publications or events you want so share with the community, please send an email with all relevant information and at least one link to a website or venue to: hello@pariscollagecollective.com
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