Photos by Jeron Hagler

My Practice

My collage practice began in 2016 at a time when I was very lost. Collage with its limitless possibility to redefine and fragment became an unconscious bridge home to myself and my body as a lesbian, trans and intersex person. It gave me a place to explore and express my queerness before it was safe to do so. Prior to finding collage, the only place I had found community in queerness had been among trees and plants, so it felt fitting to begin expressing that connection through paper. Colorful, frenzied backgrounds with subtle continuity similar to the patterns of tree canopies has become my signature style, inspired by the many times in my youth where I found myself sitting with trees for solace. I sell and showcase this series of 12inch x 12inch paper collages on paper within my local art and queer scene. Each of these pieces explore nature, spirituality, embodiment and the LGBTQIA+ experience.

My mixed media wax collages which are primarily 12inch x 12inch wax on brass are each a magickal ritual I perform under a full moon. Utilizing the energy of the materials, environment, and planets around me, I collage with the intent of community protection, healing, and liberation. I minimally manipulate the wax with my hands, instead using words, energy, natural material and intention to create each piece. Environmental collage is a medium I hope to scale larger in my practice. On a commission basis, I am able to create magical talismans utilizing this practice that attract or protect certain energy wherever they are placed.

I am currently working on the largest collage series in my career entitled Entities. Entities is a collection of 48inch x 48inch paper and mixed media collages on canvas that combine collage and witchcraft more directly. Each piece in the series incorporates paper, mirrors and pagan occult ritual to create a living piece of art or an “Entity” that extracts shame, fear and colonial violence from the viewer while simultaneously reconnecting them in right relationship to their bodies and hearts.

I began my first piece in the series, “Eat Your Heart Out”, in August of 2025. Each piece is psychically channeled with little planning prior to and during creation. Once the piece reveals itself fully and I finish the collage work, I then utilize pagan occult ritual in collaboration with my Benevolent Entities that I am in relationship with to help “Eat Your Heart Out” become a living portal for transmutation. In witchcraft, mirrors can be activated for specific purposes such as to amplify and extract energy. “Eat Your Heart Out”, in collaboration with Spirit, works to transmute or transform the sickness caused by capitalist consumption, ancestral grief, lack of accountability and systemic violence under white colonial capitalist patriarchal systems into healing and repair. It seeks to spur the process of confronting complex spiritual truths within the viewer such as holding oppressed and oppressor identities and to also bring the viewer into deeper self love and accountability.

While this piece began as an place for my own decolonial shadow work, it evolved each month into a much larger conversation touched energetically by the immensity of grief and suffering present in our world at this time. In the ten months it took for me to collage and imbue this piece with magickal purpose, “Eat Your Heart Out” now speaks to the much greater undertaking of how we begin to heal the spiritual debt and emptiness rife in our collective shadow. By gazing into its mirror, we experience ourselves as a portal to the past, present and future. Each piece in this series intends to be disruptive and uncomfortable as most healing often is. However, I’ve ensured that each piece also honors the viewers capacity and free will to heal at any given moment. And so it is.