ABOUT

​

Collage is having a moment, and I’m glad to be here for it. Curators and historians are reclaiming collage from Picasso and Braque and restoring it to the ancients -- centuries-old Japanese calligraphy mounted on scrolls, Gothic cathedrals bedecked with gold leaf and gems, Victorian scrapbooks. I think collage is as potent and demanding as any other art form. It's the most democratic: no expensive materials, just scissors, glue, and whatever you were about to throw away. And in a moment as fragmented and overloaded as this one, deciding what's worth keeping and what goes next to what might be the most honest medium we have. The scissors are the easy part. The arrangement is the point.

​

I’m Jane Palmer, an analog collage artist based in Reading, Pennsylvania. ​I discovered the wide world of collage after careers in communications and organizing, and with no training in art, I immersed myself in paper and glue and found my place. I suppose you could call my work magical realism. I cut up magazines and picture books for images, patterns, and color, then arrange them into narratives that move me and I hope move others. I love the meticulous, meditative process of cutting paper by hand, the delight of surprise, and the chance to disrupt and reimagine what exists.

​

I find meaning in the relationships between things, lifting images out of their context — a face in an advertisement, a leaf pattern in a nature guide, a wash of color from an old calendar — and building them into imaginary worlds that make some kind of sense. I might go through hundreds of iterations, moving pieces here and there, until the magic happens. Then we paste. And once pasted down, there is no digital undo.

​

For me, collage is a way of moving through the world — using materials at hand, culling what resonates, discerning what is true, and working with grace. Cutting and pasting becomes a quiet act of reconstruction, a kind of mercy, a way to make meaning.

​

My work is held in the Kanyer Art Collection, and has been exhibited at the Philadelphia Athenaeum, the Arts League of Philadelphia, Lancaster Art Vault, the Limner Gallery in Hudson, New York, GoggleWorks Center for the Arts in Reading, and the Meyerhoff Gallery in Baltimore, where she was a National Collage Society award winner. My current focus is on abstract portraiture and building a body of work that reveals the invisible complexities of older women. 

​

 

​