The process of tearing apart tissue paper and creating a collage might sound simple enough, but the technique, formally called the Tissue Paper Collage Method, took 30 years to develop.
Paint was too technical; crayons depended too much upon a person’s typology (a tense, controlled person would most likely produce tense, controlled images); watercolor, because it’s fluid, wasn’t good for people whose dispositions were too relaxed, because the medium wouldn’t push them beyond their nature.
But tearing and gluing tissue paper, explained artist and psychotherapist Karen Stefano, more readily involves the whole body. The mind can let go and let loose the hands (or heart).
“It’s a very playful thing,” she said. “You kind of really get grounded in your body.”
Stefano didn’t develop the technique, but was a longtime student of the woman who did: Edith Wallace, a Jungian analyst who taught collage playshops in New Mexico until her passing in 2004. Stefano has since taken over leading them and is one of only two people in the world (the other being the Swiss Rosemarie Ferrario) trained by Wallace in the technique.
Her annual playshops in New Mexico run for five days. Her playshop in Shepherdstown, the first she’s led in her own state, is “like a little taste,” she said.
The process includes more than just creating tissue collages. Stefano incorporates story writing, yoga, meditation and body movement.
“You write your life story in the form of a myth and prepare the stage for whatever unfolds,” she said, “and a lot unfolds.”
At her playshop in Shepherdstown, she’ll use Friday night as a general introduction, learning about the group and in turn telling members about herself.
“People usually have a burning question,” she said.
Teenage artist
Stefano, a longtime artist who’s lived in Charles Town, W.Va., for the past 25 years, grew up in Long Island and began taking the train into New York City every weekend as a teenager to take art classes. She continued to paint and sculpt while studying education and eventually earning a master’s degree in early childhood education.
Also interested in psychology and particularly dream therapy, she became a client of Wallace, began participating in her playshops in New Mexico and got hooked. By the early ’80s, Stefano was helping her lead them. “After a time, I sort of became her apprentice,” Stefano said.
In addition to New Mexico, Stefano has taught tissue paper collage in China, Japan and England.
“Tissue paper collage work, for me, initially opened up another language in that you’re creating images that come from inside yourself,” said Californiabased Elizabeth Schrieber, who has taken several sessions with Stefano. “You get to work with them so nobody’s imposing or interpreting for you. It brought me a visual, rather than a verbal, language.”
During playshops, participants write the story of their life in the form of a myth or fairy tale, make collages, view and share their work and sometimes work with body movements to decipher any bewildering collages.
No right, wrong
“It brings such permission because there is no right or wrong,” Schrieber said, “there is no ugly or beautiful, there’s no critics.”
“It’s very therapeutic because it builds self-esteem,” Stefano said.
Stefano stressed, however, that tissue collage is not art therapy. In fact, she pointed out, Jung stressed that not everyone should participate in what he called active imagination; if psychotic people did, they run the risk of agitating their condition/mental state.
People sometimes said they don’t see anything in their collages. In these cases, Stefano asks the participants to talk about their experiences making the collages and to take postures — either the posture they felt arise while creating it, or the posture their piece would be if it were alive.
“I have a thing with doorways,” she said, studying a few of her own collages. “See, that’s an interesting landscape,” she said, holding one of the finished pieces, “but it’s an inner landscape.”
She smiled.
“It’s like having a dream except you’re working on it as you’re awake,” she said of the collage process. (She uses nighttime dreams with group and individual therapy clients, as well Gurdjieff/Fourth Way, bioenergetics, Median Group Process, psychodynamic therapy, depth psychology and Social Dreaming Matrix.)
She pulled out another two pieces that were made the same day. She typically makes a bunch at a time, so the pieces can be read as a sort of journey; Stefano said sequence matters and the pieces are always numbered.
She encourages people at her playshops to do the same: continue creating until their time is up — and then go home and create, preferably. Stefano often makes collages on her own.
“If I have a question I don’t know the answer to, if I’m emotionally unbalanced, I’ll make them,” she said. “It’s a way to discharge. It’s a wonderful thing if you’re mourning.”
Tissue paper collage is used “to help people become more of themselves,” she said. “It’s only through becoming who you really are that you can achieve your true potential.”
She said that in addition to the collage playshops, guests at her New Mexico retreat have access to the trails of a nearby state forest, and the natural landscape, the quiet and the relaxation can be transformative, too.
“There are so many ways to try to unlock what people are holding,” she said, “particularly now because there’s so much social anxiety and fear.”
She thinks, however, that if you are grounded enough, social forces won’t be as disturbing or bear as much impact as they might to the next guy. And of course, collaging is one way to strengthen that grounding in the body.
The added dimension of body psychotherapy — the somatic sensations people have and the relationships between art and body — was mainly Stefano’s own and not that of Wallace’s, but to Stefano it seemed an important evolution for the work.
“I’m always amazed at what I find out. It’s such a healing thing,” Stefano said. “So, on some level, it’s my contribution. It’s giving an outlet to tap into beauty.”
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