If graphic design is the arrangement of word and image to communicate a predetermined message, then to me collage is graphic art in the service of mystery, an unconscious arrangement of found word and image to discover complex meanings, visual poems of experience.
Collage Postcards
https://www.instagram.com/dburkcollage/
I began a series of Collage Postcards when I left for a yearlong, around the world Design Sabbatical in 2016. It gave me a way to process my experiences on the road. I carried thick postcards and a small pouch with postcards, scissors, glue and a fat black pen. I used whatever found words and images I could gather and drew a black line through each finished post card to remind myself of the transience of experience. I didn’t want them to be precious. I photographed each postcard on site, wherever I made it. After my year of travel, I decided to continue my postcard practice. I champion collage as an accessible, unpretentious and very sophisticated art form. To me it can be a surprisingly profound and surprising form of art therapy. The perfect art therapy for a graphic designer with an art degree! 9 years and more than 700 postcards later, I still find the process fascinating.
Exhibition Casa Quatro, Guanajuato 2022, English Language Library, Guanajuato 2025
Featured as Designer Sketchbook by the Society of Environmental Graphic Design (SEGD) and named in Best Content of 2018, SEGD
Collage Placemats
Servings: Dinner Party Art is a series of 80 laminated placemats. I made the collages on top of a life-size black and white photo of a dinner place setting. The actual dinner plate covers the collage area. I was thinking about how life dishes it out; food, sustenance, hunger and nourishment were interesting themes and an interesting vehicle for accidental meanings.
Collage Books
Book design has a cinematic aspect; the moving relationship between word & image that tells a story over time. I’ve found that collage books are a non-traditional way to explore how multiple, disparate narratives can interact as they move through a page layout. Life is Short, for example, is a cut window book that moves from birth to death, with haiku, household tips, clouds and industrial progress…
Collage:
Collage Postcards
Servings (Collage Placemats)
Life is Short (Collage Book)
Lip Reading, Principles and Practice (Collage Book)
This is Not (Collage Book)
On Not Being Able to Paint (Collage Book)
Told at Sunset and Other Curious Songs (Collage Book)
Memory Bowl (Art Therapy Collage Workshop co-hosted with Sonia Beck Doss)