Five Years of Collaging

Offering my First Zine

Riding the Paper Plane. Digital Collage by Stella Kalaw

“If you cannot make it happy, can we at least make it beautiful,”

I heard that quote from a conversation between Kate Bowler and Rabbi Steve Leder on her podcast Everything Happens. It has stayed with me ever since, becoming a kind of mantra explaining why I continue to make collages, five years on. It has quite literally become my lifeline, carrying me through the COVID-19 lockdowns, two layoffs, long stretches of unemployment, and now—death and grief.

The process of creating something beautiful out of scraps—from paper fragments, pages from public photographic archives online, or digital ephemera—has steadied me through seasons of uncertainty and sorrow. There’s something grounding in the act of sifting and searching, of weaving incongruent pieces together into a new whole. A resurrection of sorts if you are a person of faith like me. As Rainn Wilson says, “The making of art is no different from prayer.”

I often talk about imagination when I collage. For me, it’s like entering a world where anything feels possible—a space where whimsy and absurdity are welcomed, a safe haven for exploring and connecting far-out ideas. It becomes a kind of respite, infusing hope and joy into the soul when worry and anxiety from my current challenges threaten to take root.

Is it escapism? Maybe—but in the best way. I see it as a kind of resilient armor, a steady building of courage to endure through difficult times.

These assemblages are small acts of love and reclamation. On another level, they’re a quiet defiance—a way of showing up, again and again, even when no one is watching. Even if no one, or only a few, notice, they remain my humble offerings to life—perhaps to tip the scale toward more joy, and to ease some of the sorrow, if only for a moment.

I went down memory lane and revisited many of the collages over the years. Curiosity has always been the driver so I experimented, abandoned several ideas, failed at many, while succeeded in some. But, the essence is in the making, that unexplainable compulsion to keep at it and go with the flow.

In the spirit of offerings, I finally made the leap and created my first zine. It’s a collection of 28 collages from the Februllage 2025 challenge. These are deeply meaningful to me, as they carried me through the first month of grief from my sister’s passing.

Thank you for taking a look.

Februllage became a lifeline—a daily ritual where I could lose myself in play and imagination, a creative oxygen mask giving air to my grieving heart. It allowed me to touch joy without betraying my sadness. It gave me permission to embrace whimsy, to live senselessly when Ate Marica’s passing made no sense at all.

A huge thank you to all Zine makers on Substack for inspiring me (a special shout out to

Susanne Helmert

and

Jen Mayer | Makeist

). I wanted to make something tangible that people could hold and flip through—something that captures the feeling of the work in print. While this isn’t a handmade edition, it was created with the same care and intention as all my work, and I’m excited to share it with you.

See you all next Sunday.

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