Cut-paper collage

This collage, “Reverie” is composed of cut-paper fragment and incorporates elements from fine art, magazines, advertisements, and other ephemera. In revisiting Sylvia Plath’s writing before setting out to create this piece, I was struck by her juxtaposition of the dishonest, but socially appropriate, composed facade women often adopt with the complicated, and often vicious, realities of inward life. 

For so many of us, although social mores have changed since Plath’s time, the expectation that intense emotional experiences be dealt with privately and undramatically persist. But art can hold space to express those harder aspects of existence that day-to-day life cannot always accommodate. Plath’s writing makes that kind of space; as she writes in “Elm,” from Ariel, “I know the bottom… / I do not fear it: I have been there.”