Up Front Gallery – Erica Trabold “Nourishing Flourishes”

I am a both a visual artist and trained writer. The essays I write are non-narrative, composed in fragments and images, relying heavily on repetition and juxtaposition, gaps and silences, to make meaning. My collages are analog, made with scissors and glue. Material springs from the pages of books, magazines, found objects, and a growing collection of ephemera. Unlike the digital files I create as a writer, when I collage, I make inherently physical objects. I see the tactile nature of these works as evidence of life and creative energy, an imperfect record of days. Each cut and layer bears the imprint of my hand, a kind of presence that cannot be replicated on a screen. In this way, the collages become not just artwork but artifacts of process, holding the residue of time spent in quiet, deliberate making.

Since becoming a mother, collage has become my primary creative outlet and a natural extension of my writing practice. I’m interested in text-image combinations and the novel ways their fusion allows interplay between my old standbys: repetition, juxtaposition, gaps, and silences. Even working strictly with images feels familiar because the process of composing mimics the way I write. I find myself arranging paper fragments the way I arrange sentences—testing their proximity, feeling out their resonance, noticing what emerges in the spaces between ideas. Collage has become another form of thinking on the page, a conversation between visual and written rhythms.

Motherhood has reoriented my creative impulse, and my collages bear witness to the experience of transformation, its darkness and messiness, alongside the euphoria of becoming new. I am not the same, and with me, my art has changed. The work now holds traces of exhaustion and wonder in equal measure, as if the shifts in my daily life have subtly reconfigured my sense of composition. What once felt like separate practices—mothering, writing, cutting, arranging—now move together, each informing the other with a kind of unexpected clarity.”