“Please read these as invitations:

Collage looks easy.
Collage is surprising. 
[…] Collage happens before, inside, during, after an artmaking/learning moment.
Collage is really about being open to detours.
[…] Collage is a method of care.”

-Tim Abel, “How Is Learning a Collage?” (p. 31) in Experiments in Art Research

                I’m writing this late today, because today’s been a flurry of writing a journal article (due soon!) and setting up our new house with my partner and running off to campus to meet with a friend and continuing some other university work and then having other friends over. The light slowly fading outside. The trees shifting. The dishes clinking into a stack after dinner. Sometimes on a flurried day I wonder, how do all these pieces fit together?
                Tim’s a good friend, an inspiring colleague, a caring teacher/student/companion. His article’s on my mind because I co-edited Experiments in Art Research, which came out this summer. My copy arrived today. I didn’t spend long looking at it, but behind everything else I’ve been thinking about all the wonderful friends who collaborated in writing. About Tim Abel and Ishita Dharap and Sarah Travis and Catalina Hernández-Cabal and Jorge Lucero and Rachel Gu and so many others. I’m thinking about us all as a collage, a coming together of relationships. Lives interspersed. 
                “Collage is a method of care.” Of caring how one piece sits next to, connects to another. A method of approaching the relationship between my research and my friends and the washing dishes and all the interweaving questions and researches and lives unfolding around me. Through me. Maybe today I wondered how do all these pieces fit together, but today, luckily, I also felt how all these pieces are already together. Tim’s “method of care” reminds me that all these pieces are growing together in easy, surprising, open ways.