MINDFUL COLLAGE WORKSHOP

Creative Community Healing

Funk wouldn't be much without someone to share it with. Community is crucial to living a funky life and the community space can be a powerful arena for change. Secure group atmospheres can also be a healing tool for vulnerability and acceptance of ourselves and others. As a community artist, it is my task to uplift diverse groups of people, inspire them in their own artmaking, and help them share their experiences interpersonally. The most determinantal state for an individual is to be alone in the jungle without a tribe, and finding an empowering, empathetic, and understanding tribe to belong is a difficult task for any funkedelic.

To aid this quest, I have constructed community art workshops applicable for many settings and populations, including adults, children, schools, mental health centers, and community spaces. The goal of each workshop is to encourage deeper connections in our own lives and with those around us, including meeting new people and discovering new ideas and artforms.

Exploring Creative Self-Expression Through Mindful Collage

Exploring Creative Self-Expression Through Mindful Collage is a communal healing workshop with the purpose of introducing mindfulness practice through collage art as a method of awareness, self-expression, and connection with others through shared artmaking. The workshop provides an uplifting space for people to release inner stress, introduce healing practices, connect empathetically with others over shared experiences, and create unique artwork and self-reflection materials participants can take home with them to bring mindful awareness and creativity into their lives.

Mindful Collage Methods:

1. Subconscious-Intuitive

2. Intentional Processing

3. Vision Board

Each method allows for freedom of expression but provides different ways to interpret the idea of "mindful self-expression through collage." All methods involve participants searching for fragmented materials (chaos) that they are either consciously, or unconsciously drawn to, organizing materials into a composition that reflects them (a self-portrait either abstract or representational), creating and destroying materials through cutting, tearing, gluing (restorative and self-assertive process), and arranging materials in a final design that expresses them either holistically, or specifically (organizing their chaos.)

The symbolic links between fragmented chaos of materials and of The Self, intuition, expression, ordering chaos, awareness, reflection, and the effects of trauma are evident in the therapeutic process. The accessible medium of collage for non-artists combined with the plethora of potential for non-verbal language in visual collage art is both why I initially turned to collage in my past trauma, and why it is the perfect activity for this community workshop.

Workshop Structure: