I’ve found it hard to maintain inspiration and the desire to create during quarantine. Without the ability to physically experience art in museums or studios, I’ve only found scraps of inspiration here and there. These collages have helped me express my experiences in an increasingly fragmented world, through the unpredictable nature of poetry and collage.

A lot of my poetry is ekphrastic, meaning it's an explicit study attempting to verbalize art. Ekphrastic poetry tends to focus on art in the traditional sense, like elegant paintings or ancient artifacts; to some extent, my poetry conforms to this. But these collages of my poetry also attempt to reverse this. 

During quarantine, I’ve found myself reflecting on my usual process, and my relatively linear approach to creating these collages, which is firstly to view art, secondly to give a voice to the art through poetry, and finally to produce art using the words I've written. I love the cyclical nature of this process, clipping away at pieces of art and transforming them into something new.

This was published under Adolescent's collaboration with Nearness Project. Check them out here.