Collages and Colour: mixed-race identity in personal art

I was never drawn to those flat paint strokes of a portrait. Nor the three dimensions of a sculpture, untouchable, yet yearning to be touched. Rather, I was drawn to something more indefinite and imprecise – collages. That fragmentary disorder, that psychedelic sense of what has been lost and now found, that sense in the nonsensical. They were just as confused as me – the mixed-race identity translated into art.

With sticky fingers and barely six years to my name, I would spend mornings on Sellotaped structures of whatever I could find – shells, beads, pennies, my own hastily cut hair. My teens saw collages spread across my bedroom walls like ivy, laced with feminist sweet nothings in bold. Now, at twenty, my fingers fumble through a hangover while I search for myself at the bottom of cigarette stub-packed pockets, looking for the torn label from last night’s bottle of wine. Old packets of sertraline, sacred; the train ticket from the first time she gave me butterflies; flyers from club nights I can’t remember – it’s all there, spread out, moments untangling themselves across a worn piece of card.

It's nothing revolutionary to admit that I, as a mixed-race person, have always felt somewhat lost in my identity. With my Nigerian father soon out of the picture, I was left as some Frankenstein’s Creature. As best as my white Scottish mum tried – hopeful blue eyes as she passed me Morrison’s first novel – there remained a racial space that her maternal love could never fill. But, it occurred to me, not long ago, that I’ve been filling that space myself. It was through Sellotape and staples that a sense of self was seeping out. I’d been making collages all my life. I can’t – and never could – produce anything singular. Nothing is one thing. And that includes me – mixed, coloured, fragmented.

But these fragments are not always representative of me. Much collage material comes from old magazines, books, posters – materials that I have no personal draw to except that they’re stuffed under my bed. Materials that do not belong to me, but to others. There’s something inherently mixed-race in that: the feeling that you do not have ownership over any one part of you, that you are merely a collection of other people.

And so, surely, with whitewashed magazines and blunt scissors in hand, collaging becomes nothing but an exercise in futility, crafting ourselves using no ‘self’. Surely the term ‘personal collage’ becomes oxymoronic for those of mixed heritage. What self is left when we are cutting up the lives of others, rather than our own? I’d argue that collaging - no matter how fractured - represents the vastness of the self. It’s a process of reflection. Of seeking. I’m flipping through glossy magazines for how I feel when the wine has worn off and my head is no longer floating but sinking. And I find it in the blue eyes of a white girl in Vogue. Or that shade of yellow – the one which looks like how age three felt, with cake frosted lips, sponge soft on my tongue– is found in a hair ad. A model’s dusk pink lips, cupid’s bow and all, that I’d long for on nights when I’d wish my skin was anything other than this indeterminate grey. A font slopes in the same way my stomach rose and fell when he told me I was pretty – even if I knew it was only to get in my pants. It’s about looking outward to find what’s inward. Because – if mixed-race individuals know anything – it’s that outsides and insides don’t always look the same. Collages, therefore, become not impersonal but hyper-personal. They become a means to access the self in a way like no other. What are we all if not kaleidoscopic creations of others? Emotionally, mentally, physically – kaleidoscopes, every one of us.

But if we’re perpetually seeking ourselves in others, there must be some sense of self-lost along the way. With this loss comes a fine line between self-liberation and self-erasure. And that’s more than a little risky for mixed-race individuals. For us – like with any marginalised group – there are all those miniature details we’d like to forget under layers of tissue paper and glitter glue. Forget not fitting in your whole life, your dark summer skin, your non-white second name, the light skin privilege induced guilt. There’s freedom in forgetting. For the mixed-race, collaging becomes the artistic equivalent of swigging a half bottle of vodka, pretending we’re fine when really, we’re smiling through numb lips with smudged mascara from club bathroom tears. It’s escapism. But there is nothing wrong with losing the self – for a little while – if you find it again. As long as you come back home, even hungover and heels in hand. Just don’t make a habit of it.

Besides, collaging acts as a more accessible art form to explore – and lose – the self with. Collages exist outside the rigid frame of traditionally taught techniques. They don’t hold that fear of a high school art classroom, white hippy art teacher telling you the way you’re holding that brush is all wrong. The mess on your bedroom wall isn’t subject to the unforgiving words of upper-class critics. You can layer, you can blur, you can mix – you can make something that feels like you and looks like you. But this lack of prestige, this lack of fear, is complex. Like any marginalised group, it’s not uncommon for mixed-race individuals to experience imposter syndrome. And so, when we find ourselves through an erratic blur of colours, are we saying this is all we’re good for? Are we diminishing ourselves? Only if we choose to. There is power in being an ‘imposter’. Forget the syndrome. If any group is an imposter it’s mixed-race individuals: we’re both, other, neither – all at once. And so, collages, once again, become the most intrinsically mixed-race art form.

Understanding art as a possible exploration of racial identity is liberating. And – for mixed-race individuals – seeing ourselves as art, as collages, is empowering. I am drawn to them because I am them. What’s more, a collage is whatever you define as one. And so, exploring and seeking our mixed-race identity through art allows us this same self-definition– a right which is seldom granted to us. In defining our own race and expressing it ourselves, we save our mixed identity from a fate of merely scrap paper in the recycling. Collages preach that we are beautiful in all our colours, however chaotically arranged. There is beauty in our deviation and disorder.

By Eilidh Akilade

(she/her)

Edited: Paola Duran (@wintrytokyo)

Graphics: Daija (@freshed__squeezed)

Eilidh Akilade (@eilidhakilade_)