Collage as Memoir: Towards Re-membering our Future Selves

Overview:

In this workshop, participants will explore the art of collage as a powerful form of artistic expression linked to re-membering (a non-linear narrative) that can imagine new ways of being outside of social, familial, political or historical scripts. Using the principle of “madness as magic” we will explore how collage can help us transform narratives of injustice (ex: racism, ableism, sanism etc) towards profound testimonies of future possibilities. We’ll delve into the intersection of memory, identity, and creativity through the medium of hand-cut paper collages. Whether you’re a seasoned artist or a beginner, this workshop is designed to inspire and engage. Using images and photographs collected from your own sources, you will learn how to create hand-cut paper collages with personal narrative, transformative & poetic meaning.

Workshop Objectives:

Setting Up Your Collage Workspace: 

• Learn how to create an organized and efficient home work-station for collage.     
• How to gather materials and get comfortable with them.        

The Re-Membering process: 

• Observation: Collect images and photographs from your own sources.
• Layering: cannot know the whole story, there are several layers of narrative at play (speaker/ relationships, place, history, society,       objects)
• Deconstruction: Cut and manipulate these images to create new meanings. Tension btw Physical/Metaphysical
• Rehearsal: Experiment with compositions and arrangements.
• Relationship: Explore your relationship to the materials, the deconstruction and rehearsal.
• Assembly: Bring your collage to life by layering and gluing the pieces together. Doubt (working with the unknown)

Embracing Memory: 

• Understand collage as a metaphor for memory. Just as memories are fragmented and layered, so too are collages.
• Explore how personal experiences and emotions can be expressed through visual elements.

 ‘Madness as Magic’: 

• Discover your own creative tendencies and embrace ‘Madness as Magic’.
• Consider the historical and contemporary relevance of collage as a versatile medium connected to Mad & Crip artistic expression.

 

Workshop Details:

• Instructor: Christina Foisy (PhD), artist-researcher, health equity specialist, Mad Studies independent scholar & activist
• Dates: September 22nd (online) 
• Time: 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm EST
• Platform: Online via Zoom 
• Cost: $20 (student, retired, fixed income) or $25 regular

Instructor’s Philosophy: Madness as Magic

In my collage & writing process, madness is magic: it’s a way of knowing and channeling our energy to inspire transformation.  My interdisciplinary art engages with ghosts that hover in between the lines of repressed stories. I weave fragments of memory, objects, heirlooms, and archival traces into new frames to imagine possible worlds governed by the heart. I use collage to remember what I am afraid of forgetting--to forget what I am afraid of remembering. My poems are collages: pieces of people--their voices, movements, places, relationships that somehow come together to illustrate important subtleties of love and loss. They are not time capsules meant to glorify or sterilize the past. Rather they serve to unearth what wasn’t and to re-imagine what could be. My collages imagine a world where Mad & Crip bodies do not need to be “cured” but rather mutually cared for and welcomed as a desirable ontology and epistemology from which we can begin to reimagine our relations to each other and to other species within diverse and ever changing ecosystems and relations.

Artist Bio

Christina Foisy (she/her) is a white, settler, Neurodivergent poet, collage and sound artist with a BA in Creative Writing, Gender Studies, MEd and PhD in Health Humanities and Mad Studies currently living in Toronto / Tkaronto (Treaty 13). Her art practice serves to unearth what is difficult to say out loud or to know for certain. The leading catalyst for the creative exploration of grief was her mother’s postpartum suicide and father's hoarding as a counter-archive. She began a collaging ephemera found from the hoard (love poems on scrap paper, hand-drawn birthday cards, lists, home renovation plans, calendars, sketches) to re-member and transform grief into beauty. Her writing and collages have appeared in literary journals and have been funded by the Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council. She is actively involved in the Disability Justice / Mad movements and is the co-founder of Mad Ethics: Service-User Research and Social Justice Collective. You can learn more about her research and creative practice here: www.christinafoisy.com