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Since the inauguration of President Donald Trump in January, I have been feeling a sense of despair, fear, and hopelessness. I witnessed our government system, diplomatic relationships, Diversity Inclusion and Equity initiatives, which this country has built up in the past several decades, collapse within a month. I recognized that humanity and democracy, which I breathed in everyday in my life in the U.S. should no longer be taken for granted. Instead of questioning leaders in the current administration or scapegoating the members of particular social groups, I stepped back from this chaotic world and asked myself questions. How did we get here? What is really happening? Where are we going?

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I created a collage entitled “Redemption” to find my answers to these questions. When I began making the collage, I didn’t have any predetermined themes in my mind, nor did I have any clue about what the final product would be. The only choice I made was the form of art: collage. I chose this medium because it allows me to turn the ordinary into something new, something that I can explore and question with curiosity (Seiden 2001, cited in Scotti & Chilton, 2025). By juxtaposing images, a process which I am drawn to, I wanted to make new meanings that go beyond the existing systems of meaning and the order that we have in our current society (Chilton & Scotti, 2014; Gullion, 2023; Hopkins, 1997 cited in Scotti &Chilton,2025). In addition, this method seemed appropriate to represent the chaos that I am experiencing now, which cannot be made sense of with pure logic. 

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I began my collage-making by collecting images that I was drawn to. I cut out those images from magazines and advertisements. When I heard striking news on a number of podcasts, I searched for images associated with the news on the internet and printed them out. In addition, I took photographs of nature (i.e., trees, the ocean, and flowers) and objects that I encountered in my daily life. Collecting images from various sources allowed me to mix  items that are usually separated (or quite distinct) from each other in our conscious minds and reorder them. Placing images on a sheet of paper guided my intuition  broke the binary divisions that the human world has created and trapped us in; the collage broke the division of personal and public, religious and political, social science and art, animals and humans, sin and sacred, life and death, and light and darkness.

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The centerpiece of this collage is an image of alleged gang members walking in a hallway of a high security prison in El Salvador. It  was the most striking image that I have seen in the past few weeks. What I saw in the image was suffering.  The suffering that individual prisoners was carrying was more than their own. They were carrying an enormous amount of suffering of their families, communities, countries, and the entire world, which are placed on their shoulders. To witness this extreme level of inhumanity placed on the shoulders of a few individuals was painful. And I felt the pain in my body.

The images of the prisoners became the centerpiece of this work. Steven Levine (Hillman, 1977, cited in Levine & Levine, 1992) states that “suffering is a part of human condition” (p.69). And people present their suffering in their visual work. I think this is what I did through my collage.

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 The collage represents a deeper and sacred meaning of suffering and pain. I did so by adding an image of Jesus Christ carrying the cross in front of the prisoners, who are also carrying crosses. This connection between Jesus and the prisoners turned the image of suffering into redemption, deliverance from sin (through Jesus’s resurrection), suffering, and death of Christ and sacred individuals.

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Surprisingly, this theme of redemption overlaps with the spiritual awareness that I experienced through the seed activity we participated in during the February workshop. I realized that life is a  perpetual circle, where the beginning is the end, and the end is the beginning. So, death and (re)birth are not opposites of each other; instead, they stand next to each other and could flip their positions instantly.

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I applied this notion of life cycle to understand what is happening in our chaotic world today. I understood that what appears to be sin is standing next to the sacred and they could flip their positions easily. The same thing can be said about enemies and friends, leaders and criminals, peace and violence, authoritarianism and democracy, capitalism, and communism. This awareness showed me how to answer my original questions: How did we get here? What is really happening? Where are we going?

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Through this college-making, I also learned that I am more than social categories (e.g., gender and race). The theme of redemption and the images of Jesus Christ that emerged  in my collage were surprising to me as I do not identify myself as a Christian. However, exploration of this Christian theme allowed me to get in touch with  what is underlying in this religious theme: human suffering, the desire for liberation, and rebirth. Those are universal themes all human beings experience.

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I believe every culture and religion has developed narratives and symbols to represent the meaning of those universal themes. So, many important narratives and symbols from all cultures serve as entry points to the collective unconscious, where suffering and desire for liberation reside. I became aware that social categories cannot determine who we are, although they influence narratives and symbols that each group uses to make meanings of this world.

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I aspire to learn more about my potential clients' and students' cultural backgrounds, narratives, and symbols that are significant in their cultures so that I can open the door to the deeper collective unconscious world with the clients. I also want to explore what is in their individual and collective unconscious together.

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By using art, the language of the unconscious (Knill, Levine, & Levine, 2005), I hope mto stand by people who may be shouldering suffering and pain in the present world as well as those that they inherited from the past. In doing so, I hope to make this world a little more peaceful and humane place than it is today.

 

 

References

Knill, P., Levine, E., Levine, S. (2005). Principles and practice of expressive arts therapy: toward a therapeutic aesthetics. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Levine, S. and Levine, E. (1992). Image abuse and the dialectic of interpretation. In Poesis: The language of psychology and speech of the soul (pp.63-75). PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. 

Scotti, V., & Chilton, G. (2025). Collage as arts-based research. In P. Leavy (Ed.), Handbook of arts-based research (pp. 357–379). The Guilford Press.