“Collage makes something new without hiding the traces of the old, makes a new whole out of scraps without erasing the scrappiness, emerges from an idea of creation not as making something out of nothing, like god on the first day or painters and novelists, but as making something out of a world already exploding with images, ideas, wreckage and ruin, artifacts, shards, and remnants.”  Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence (Solnit, 2021) Traveling alone offers a daunting and exciting brand of self-ownership. You set your own schedule, your own pace, and your own destination, while assuming almost total responsibility for yourself. It’s vulnerable and empowering. Each new encounter calls on unfamiliar or undiscovered parts of yourself. There are moments of loneliness, exhaustion, and exhilaration, all of which you are left to confront on your own. I understood the weight of these experiences while driving from North Carolina to Oregon in the summer of 2020. Taking a multi-week detour through the Southwest, driving 15 miles too fast and screaming along with Prince, the surreal nature of constantly changing my environment sunk in. I had laid down my back seats to make room for a 6 x 2ft piece of foam I generously referred to as a mattress. Beside my bed was a cooler (the kitchen), a box of books and Kind bars (the library/pantry), and a duffle bag of clothes. I could go days without seeing another person, I felt completely independent and free. Each morning I followed the same routine: stretch, coffee, gas (always taking advantage of the gas station bathroom), hike, rest, find a new campsite, repeat. The world was calm, quiet, and my place in it even more so.  I photographed everything along the way. Every rock, texture, tree—even eye-catching stickers on bathroom walls. I traveled and collected images trying to find a way to share what was so captivating about these experiences. A year later, on another road trip that snaked through Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri, I started to play with my stockpile of travel photographs. I had spent most of 2020 building my art practice and digging into collage as a process and medium. Solo is a series of digital collages that combine these photographs. The objects and places depicted range from Jackson, Wyoming to Agra, India. Their rearrangement is inspired by the desire to create new, imaginative worlds that highlight the real beauty in each component. Solo stitches together moments full of adventure, freedom, and growth, inviting the viewer to explore. Typically in collage the artist appropriates found images. They create something new using scraps of our shared realities, leaving references to culture intact. This process evokes a truth-to-reality by using the familiar to spark new ways of thinking. I’ve wanted to shift away from this to create a body of collages using my own imagery, so that from beginning to end the work is mine. Solo exclusively uses photographs I’ve taken in moments where only I was present, adding another layer of ownership to a fiercely independent process. They were then cut apart and arranged to depict new, surreal places. Each collage is meant to represent a secret world, the kind you find at the top of a mountain or the other side of a forest. They seek to convey the otherworldly magic of exploration, the kind of magic I felt in these moments The poetic freedom of traveling partially comes from chasing the horizon, but mostly, it is the product of endless new experiences. A new destination means new context. Context helps to define who we are. Changing the circumstances in which you exist changes the way you are understood. For example, I act a certain way around my parents in an effort to be a good daughter. This differs from the way I would act around an employer or partner, because after all, I don’t wish my partner to view me as a good employee. The desired outcome of each of these contexts is based on the expectations of the situation, and the success of my performance is determined by the responses received. The picture painted by the performance and its reception defines our personal identity. There is experience and there is narrative. Experience, or the experiential self, is presence. It is the way you perceive the world as it is happening around you. Narratives are the story of your experiences combined with your interactions, they form the foundation of our identities (Kahneman, 2012). Personal experiences are assessed internally, whereas our identity is shaped by our actions and the way they relate to our environment. Identity at its core is relative (Cavarero, 2010), and while we can’t control the effect of our actions, we do have the ability to alter their context. By choosing to change our environment, we gain ownership of our experiences. While we can never truly have control of the narrative, having control of our experiences, in any capacity, gives us the ability to shape the narrative.  When we are transplanted to new places our identities have the opportunity to grow. We aren’t met with the same responses everyday and suddenly our traits are seen in a new light. What was called “flighty” at home suddenly becomes “spontaneous.” We change our context and invite a new understanding of ourselves. When you’re thrown into something new, where no expectations exist, a door opens to self-actualization. On these trips I found that I was capable of a lot more than I thought. I wasn’t afraid to spend all day wandering through red rocks, my social anxiety started to fade, and my appreciation for life and my freedom grew. Collage serves as the visual manifestation of recontextualization. A distressed sticker superimposed over sand dunes placed in the foreground of a mountain range not only creates a new landscape, it takes 3 images, turns them into scraps, and creates a new, imaginative, magical something. Collage doesn’t take away the innate beauty of these images; instead it uses their individual qualities to shape an environment that fosters a new way of thinking about them.    The creation of artwork depends on its process. In the case of Solo, ownership of the images mirrors the self-ownership I found while gathering them. Collaging them together created a new narrative without destroying what was already there, keeping intact the integrity of the pieces while shaping an environment that encourages growth. I hope the viewer can feel the wonder and empowerment of this series and its process the way I did.  Sources Cavarero, A., & Cavarero, A. (2010). In Relating narratives storytelling and selfhood (pp. 20–20). essay, Routledge.  Kahneman, D. (2012). Thinking, fast and slow. Penguin.  Solnit, R. (2021). Recollections of my nonexistence. Penguin Books.