Collage

Collage is an arts-based research approach to meaning-making through the juxtaposition of a variety of pictures, artifacts, natural objects, words, phrases, textiles, sounds, and stories. It is not meant to provide one-to-one transfer of information; rather, it strives to create metaphoric evocative texts through which readers, audiences, and patrons create their own meanings on a given research topic. Usually, material is taken out of context from a range of sources and used to create a new assemblage from the bricolage collected. What underpins the creation of research collages is the attempt to construct meanings about the research question and/or process, the participants, and emerging themes.

Although collage is traditionally thought of as an artistic product, Donna Davis and Lynn Butler-Kisber focused on its analytic function with the belief that meaning can be mediated through images. Davis, a fine- and commercial artist, found that she projected difficulty she was having with a research participant into a collage she was making for another purpose. On examination, she was able to translate the images into words, further articulating her thoughts on the research. In 2006, Sara Promislow presented a paper about using visual collages as an in-depth analytic tool to assist her in articulating what the research experience meant for her (see Figure 1). She created one on the research process and one for each of the participants: “With the rich information and knowledge gleaned from the collages, I was able to continue the research analysis with a deeper and more complex understanding of their experiences” (p. 5).

Joe Norris, Glenys Berry, and Giacomo Guercio detailed a collage-making process from arts-based courses taught by Norris. Students articulated to one another their research topics/questions and browsed through a large assortment of magazines looking for images and phrases that “called” them. They were encouraged to go to what Lorri Neilsen referred to as the liminal space, a threshold in which new meanings can be found (see sidebar on p. 96). They were asked “not to think, edit, or censor” but to collect everything that intuitively spoke to them. Because this was a [Page 95]group process, they also provided pictures and phrases to classmates when an image or phrase seemed to relate to their peers' topics.

Figure 1 “Methodology” Collage by Sara Promislow

Source: “Methodology” (Promislow, 2004), Collage, mixed media, 11 [.dotmath] 9.6 inches. Used by permission.

For Norris, the intuitive is the essential first step. Rather than employing a theme analysis and coding approach that creates categories, he invited researchers to take a leap of faith and enter into an imaginative state where meanings emerge through the interplay among the research question, the collected data, and seemingly disjointed images and words. Using Hans-Georg Gadamer's theory of translation, Norris believes that new meanings can be found in the space between two languages, in this case the visual and the written. Guercio affirmed this in his description of a collage he made to help him understand his life's journey: