Get acquainted with the creatives of the PH cut-and-paste scene!
If you’re a millennial or Gen-Z who has lived on the internet for quite some time, chances are you’ve encountered the mesmerizing world of digital collage at least once. These bizarre and surrealist visuals often find their way into the thumbnails of online articles, music videos like Coldplay’s “Up&Up,” Mac Miller’s “Good News”, or even album covers like Red Velvet’s “The Red Summer – Summer Mini Album” What sets this art form apart is its ingenious use of layering random and seemingly unrelated images to create a new cohesive visual piece through the art of copy-pasting.
In the age of Photoshop and the omnipresence of social media, collage has gone beyond paper cutouts, scissors, and glue, evolving into a medium that knows no bounds and rules. One platform that has become a bustling hub for both local and international collage enthusiasts is Instagram, where talents from all corners of the globe converge to showcase their exceptional skills and connect with art enthusiasts worldwide.
Within this thriving landscape, Filipino artists who specialize in this technique have carved out their creative niches, leaving an indelible mark on the scene. In 2020, the birth of the Manila Collage Collective on Instagram sparked a movement to promote artists and diverse collage styles in the Philippine art community. Since its establishment, the account featured homegrown creatives and curated independent exhibits around the metro, a testament to the immense growth of the collage community in the country.
So if you’re new to the world of digital collage or looking to widen your exposure to it, here are some of the local visionaries you should definitely see on your IG feeds.
1. Marika of Woman, Create (@womancreate)
Colorful, feminine, and explorative – this is how 33-year-old Marika describes her pieces which are constantly evolving. If you have a passion for women empowerment or loved Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2022), Woman, Create is the account to follow! Scrolling through her feed, elements of flora, gems, and womanly figures saturate her collages, layered with an interesting mix of tiny objects and patches of textures placed amidst the backdrop of busy images.
As a visual artist, Marika’s composes her art in an intricate process of hoarding, sorting, and cutting images. Once she organizes all the images that she wants to include in the piece, she finds her flow in putting together her vision of her collage art, which is mainly inspired by femininity and its ideals.
“I want people who view my work to be inspired by the value and power of femininity – which often has been pegged as the lesser or weaker attribute – and to be empowered by it,”
On a personal note, Marika utilizes her art to express her feelings and life struggles. “Collage is all about destroying current things in order to transform them into something new, which I feel is how art meets me in my current reality,” she shared.
2. Cam De Mayo (@keepcam)
Looking through the @keepcam feed, you’ll be greeted with vibrant colors and grainy surrealist treats. For Cam De Mayo, 28, stumbling upon collage was brought upon by a venture to explore different art styles. Unlike most collage artists, De Mayo rarely uses stock photos and instead samples original photography from her friends and creatives that she comes across on a night out. “Permission mandatory!” she stressed.
When inspiration hits, De Mayo immediately grabs their laptop to work on photo collages that marry vector and photo manipulation. She uses a subtractive digital process when making collages. All the elements are dumped into a single artboard and omitted along the way. From this, De Mayo takes real scenarios and puts her own thought-provoking visual exaggerations to them.
“As someone with ADHD, literally anything and everything is an of inspo for my pieces—but I would say most of the time they’re inspired by current events and trends.”
3. Ab Hong (@ab.hong)
Out of the many artists shifting to digital mediums to make their collage pieces is 29-year-old, full-time artist Ab Hong. Besides creating digital photomontages, Hong switches from analog collage from time to time. Scans of her sketchbook are reminiscent of vintage magazines and picture books, combined with ephemera of dried flowers and handwritten text.
Collage-making is a three-step process for Hong: first pick up a book, second pick up a pair of scissors, and the rest is intuition. After flipping back and forth from her books, she cuts the images slowly to compose the art piece.
Hong finds inspiration from different emotions, whether in perseverance, melancholy, or genuine love—every piece she finishes excites her artistic spirit on what she can come up with next. The fact that collage art has no rules is what makes the art form satisfying for her.
“The free-spirited nature of collage is an antidote to my tendency towards perfectionism, which is non-existent when it comes to collage. I felt right at home and I never stopped creating since then.”
4. Andi Lanuza (@andilanuza)
This one’s for the K-pop stans! If you’re looking for artists who share the same passion for BTS as you, look no further, because 30-year-old Andi Lanuza combines her love for Korean boybands with her art.
Lanuza’s maximalist work, which she describes as an “organized mess” is heavily influenced by the colorful, striking, and diverse visuals of K-Pop – especially with how the music is a combination of multiple genres. Inspiration for her work can spring from the scrap packaging of everyday items or her current favorite playlist.
“The layers of sound in a song inspire me so much to put different things that don’t normally go together in one piece.”
Growing up as an artsy kid adept at Photoshop, Lanuza’s technique is vibrant and unique, having even made mesmerizing collages that move. Her collage-making is unstructured, relying on her gut feeling. Throughout her collage journey, Lanuza has also learned to work on multiple projects at a time, allowing her to explore her creativity even more. She says, “I rarely finish anything in a day. This allows me to step back and review the elements before I stick them all together”.
5. Lei Reburiano (@collage.lei)
When you see a collage with a grainy, greenish-cyan, and red-orange color scheme, it’s probably the work of Lei Reburiano, known as @collage.lei in the art community. You can distinguish his work through his minimalist use of flora and fauna, female figures, and incorporated line art.
Reburiano, 37, looks up to the works of surrealist artist René Magritte. He aims to emulate the beauty of Magritte’s uncanny art in conveying his story. His green-and-orange pieces come from life experiences in general, as they provide a temporary escape to his own imaginary world, helping Reburiano convey his feelings visually. He shares that having other people relate to your art is an amazing feeling. “It somehow validates a certain portion of you that you are not alone, and they also felt something,”
As a freelance creative consultant, Reburiano doesn’t have any fixed processes and creative rituals, feeling that he performs best when the art-making is done without intention.
“That’s the beauty of collage—the contrast between having a process and not.”
6. Michael Lorenzana (@michaelorenzana)
Here’s an account that will trigger your wanderlust. From architectural structures, blue oceans, tall mountains, and verdure—visual artist and photographer Michael Lorenzana’s artworks combine pieces of travel from all over the world.
With a clean and intentional composition, Lorenzana, 32, showcases images of people isolated in different elements against a muted and solid color background. He shared that he has no specific style, but lets his photographs lead the tone and creative direction of his collages.
His minimalist pieces come from his general idea of how the collage will turn out, but his process involves exploration and playing around until the final output. The beautiful collages are also inspired by his personal experiences.
“I always create based on what I’m going through. Each element has its own personal story that I try to convey. It’s always a good outlet to let out emotions in an abstract way.”
7. Arden of Unardent (@unardent)
Prepare to feast your eyes on @unardent’s surreal photomontages that harmonize textures, graphic design, and intricate composition. For Arden, 24, collages are a way to memorialize and archive parts of our lives that we want to remember. The word “sentimental” describes their complex art style – with common motifs of oil paintings, text bubbles, landscapes, vintage cutouts, and imagery of goats and sheep. “My style of collage varies from dark and somewhat occult to sweet and mundane but recently I’ve found that my recent work has been more about celebrating tender, fond, and warm moments,” they shared.
Arden finds inspiration from anything under the sun, especially from shared experiences of their close circles. Each collage starts from a phase of tedious research and visualizing before fixing the composition, recoloring, and giving depth by adding texture. Most importantly, Arden believes that taking time to appreciate and be proud of your own work is also a part of the process.