The Collages
Nineteen plates made during the first descent, in seven phases. A standalone art book, 8.5 inches square, with plate-by-plate analysis.
Author’s note
I started making collages in 2023, during the deepest part of the first descent. I made nineteen major pieces over about eight months because words had completely failed me, and I needed to make something with my hands or I was going to lose my mind entirely.
I would prompt AI image generators — Midjourney, mostly, sometimes DALL-E — to create thousands of fragments. Faces, architecture, creatures, symbols, patterns. Then I’d pull these fragments into Photoshop and start chopping them all up, then arranging them. No sketches, no plan, no conscious intention beyond “make something that feels right.” It was more a meditative activity while freaking out than it was making art. I’m a writer and a decent musician but I’ve never been a visual artist.
I didn’t know I was descending to the Underworld — I just thought my life had turned into a torrent of other people’s pain. I didn’t know what the symbols meant: didn’t know the cauda pavonis, didn’t know the alchemical significance of nested triangles, didn’t know that ravens in contained geometry are textbook psychopomp symbolism. I was working purely by feel, arranging fragments until something clicked into place that felt true in a way I couldn’t articulate.
The AI generated raw materials; it didn’t make the art. The alchemy lived in the choosing, cutting, and arranging — in my hands, my psyche.
Between them the nineteen pieces document the whole arc, none of which I intended. Death and containment at the foundation. Then navigation, the underworld finally rendered as a landscape with directions in it. Then the portraits — the people the marriage was actually made of. Then the trickster. Then the wave, which was the turn. Then the tools for coming back.
The person who made these collages is not the same person who emerged from making them. That’s the point.
—E.
I — Death · The Shadowwork Series
II — Navigation · The Dreamwork Series
III — The Digital Nigredo · The 8-Bit Pieces
V — The Turn, and Integration
VI — Interlude · The Anima in Full
VII — The Goal, and a Coda
In the book
These are screen-sized views. The book sets each plate at 8.5 inches square, the size they were made to be seen at, with plate-by-plate analysis — free as a PDF, or in print.
