From Portrait Workshop to Collective Mural: Reconstructing Identity Through Collage

Recently, we ran a workshop exploring a simple but surprisingly difficult question:

What does it mean to express yourself freely?

We began with conversation rather than making. As an icebreaker, participants reflected on moments of witnessing expression in everyday life: When was the last time you saw someone doing something you wished you could do? When did you last see someone expressing themselves in a way that stayed with you?

The discussion quickly opened onto larger questions around visibility, confidence, freedom, identity, and permission. Participants spoke about things they wished they could do more openly: singing out loud, dancing without self-consciousness, moving freely, speaking honestly, taking up space, existing without judgement or fear.

From these conversations, participants transformed ideas into visual statements.

Using coloured paper, cut letters, shapes, and collage techniques, they created poster-like works built around phrases and declarations drawn from the discussion. Some pieces were playful and direct: “Dance like no one was watching.” Others carried quieter or more powerful reflections on safety, freedom, and self-expression.

The process was less about producing polished artworks and more about giving visual form to thoughts that often remain internal.

These works are now entering a second life.

The collages have been scanned into digital form and are being processed through methods developed in our ongoing project, The Fragmentation of Identity: Reconstructing the Familiar in Portrait.

Rather than preserving each piece as a fixed document, we are deliberately cutting, layering, fragmenting, and reconstructing them. Letters become textures. Statements break apart and reform. Colours, symbols, and fragments from multiple participants begin to overlap and interact.

Through this process, individual declarations are transformed into something collective.

What began as personal reflections on expression becomes raw material for a larger mural exploring how identity, voice, and visibility are assembled and then how they can be reimagined through collaboration, disruption, and reconstruction.

In many ways, this mirrors the core ideas behind The Fragmentation of Identity: the understanding that identity is rarely singular, stable, or neatly resolved. It is built from fragments (experiences, aspirations, constraints, performances, memories,) and the versions of ourselves we allow the world to see.

The workshop may have started with a simple question about expression, but the work continues to evolve.

We’re now following the fragments to see what new image emerges.

Welcome to the Art Dept.