Surreal Collages area a fantastic way to challenge students to think using their wildest creative capacities. I've led successful lessons with year 7s and 8s, which I will detail below, but I will also here explore how I can develop its theories and concepts to challenge students in KS4/5.
Years 7 & 8
Zoom in on an image until it looks mundane and ask students to consider "What will we see when we zoom out?"
This activity is less of a cognitive process and rather more about inspiring students to consider out-of-the-box solutions to questions posed to them, so this activity works well with younger students. The answer may be hinted at in the cropped image, or it may be used to surprise, amuse and delight the students. In the latter case, students were taught to analyse the image and describe it using new key words I would introduce to them in the lesson. First giving students an opportunity to generate their own keywords before associating their suggestions to the key words of the lesson.
I taught my year 8s three collage techniques through which they could create three designs in the lesson:
Resize - Students would alter the perceptive scale of a subject by placing it in another context.
Replace - Students would cut out elements from a subject and replace it with visually similar objects.
Remove - Students would cut into a subject to remove and reposition elements.
Pop Art:
The year 8 lesson on Surreal Collage was framed within pop-art, especially the origin of pop art as a collage-based practice founded first in the UK. Images from the print images that surround us, or the 'endless rainfall of images' as Italo Calvino describes it, can be used as a medium for expressing unique meanings. This also provided a visual language and theme for the activity. I would suggest printing out images for students to use if they struggled to find appropriate images in the magazines your department has. These can also be handed to students that require additional support. This works especially students with ADHD to provide them something to focus on from the start of the lesson, and for students that are slower at using scissors.
Year 9
By Year 9, students may be more engaged to explore the concepts and meanings of a genre more formally, and I find that the best way to do this is by designing lessons around artists. I will present below five artists that create Surreal Collages.
It is curious however, that all these artists that use the same medium and style, are engaged to explore such similar topics. All of these artists explore collage as a means of 'synergising' humanity and nature in some way, whether that is to present dystopian images of reconnecting with nature or using natural elements to explore our inner psyche.
The style of each one of these artists can be presented and dissected by students, generating unique success criteria through image analysis. As these artists explore such similar themes, students can be challenged to compare more resolute differences between artists.
Eugenia Loli
Suggested Success criteria:
Carefully cut components
Vintage images (1950s?)
Space/ cosmic scale
playful/ youthful
California based artist Eugenia Loli draws inspiration for her surreal art collages from vintage magazine images. Loli intends for her images to serve as a snap shot from a surreal movie from which the viewer can create his or her own narrative.
Johanna Goodman
Suggested Success criteria:
focus on shapes, rather than cutting seamlessly
Patterns and colour - the subject contrasts greatly to the other figures shown
body-parts are cut out and rearranged to form poses
Elements from different eras compiled together.
Single image background
Goodman's art often features surreal, dreamlike compositions that combine elements from fashion, history, nature, and pop culture. She has received acclaim for her unique and recognisable style, and has had brand deals with many well-known companies, such as: Facebook, adidas, National Geographic and the New York Times. Throughout her career, Goodman has contributed to numerous publications and exhibited her work in galleries, earning a reputation as a leading figure in the field of collage art.
Sarah Eisenlohr
Suggested Success criteria:
Limited colour palette
focussed theme.
en-largened scale
delicate, ornate style
In her artist statement Montana based artist Sarah Eisenlohr explains that her collages use places of existence to create fictional ones in an effort to demonstrate the ways in which humans have transformed the earth.
Eisenlohr uses the collage as a medium in order to transplant the influence of humanity on images of idealised untouched landscapes culled from vintage magazine
Ernesto Artillo
Suggested Success criteria:
Very limited use of colour - mostly greyscale
body-parts cut into to create layers within subjects
mixed media, use of pens/paints
very angular cutting technique
Ernesto Artillo is a Spanish artist that works for scores of fashion labels like Celine, Elie Saab and Mango to give their ad campaigns a creative elevation. Ernesto explored his process in his own words, explaining, “For me, collage means detaching from my tendency of keeping everything in order. I’m constantly trying to become more abstract and less geometric. It allows me to literally cut/break with things – even though they are my own pictures – to create a new order. I suppose collage makes me challenge my own conventions.”
Rocio Montoya
Suggested Success criteria:
Minimalist, design is simply stated - two main elements only.
Very limited use of colour - mostly greyscale
body-parts cut into to create layers within subjects
contrast between angular and detailed cutting.
Madrid based photographer, graphic web designer/editor who specialises in the experimental portrait. Montoya cites the human body in synergy with nature, the female figure and the loss of identity as the conceptual basis of her work. Particularly, Montoya explores the the behaviours and emotional states of human beings by editing images to convey their understanding of the world around them through aesthetic elements
KS4/5
Lesson Title: An Overwhelming Dream
Image study:
This surreal' composition above is one of Max Ernst’s Surrealist collages from his novel Une Semaine de Bonté (A Week of Kindness).
A woman lies asleep in a lavishly adorned bed, draped with fringed and tasseled curtains. In the same room, a bearded man wearing a frock coat stands, thoughtfully observing her with his hand on his chin. Behind him, an oversized table and chair dominate the scene, while the floor beneath him is submerged in crashing waves. He remains oblivious to both the rising flood and the two men at his feet, who cling to floating debris, apparent survivors of a shipwreck.
This image of a man studying a sleeping woman directly suggests that Ernst and the Surrealists in general have been influenced greatly by Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theories.
The Surrealists considered dreams a principal means to gain access to the unconscious.
Following Freud surrealist artists and philosophers published many accounts of their own dreams in the journal 'La Révolution Surréaliste'. Here, Ernst collaged together images cut from old book illustrations to depict dream-like scenes
Collage is often thought of as a modern artistic technique, however, the word – from the French verb coller, meaning “to stick” – was first used to describe the Cubist innovations of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who began to stick newspaper cuttings and other materials onto their canvases in 1912. The Surrealists saw collage as a means to enact what they considered to be the innate poetic activity of the unconscious mind, the combination of disparate ideas to create a new thing, ripe for metaphorical composition.
Ernst's drawings show us that collage doesn't require to be engaged in directly with image clippings, but that the ideas of surrealism can be explored and recognised in paintings and other art forms. This opens the door to engaging with this topic in a variety of ways.
Joiner Photography
Surrealism in cubism
Digital compositions with transparent png or Photoshop
Creating surreal compositions through traditional media
Planning out collage artworks - (Collage at a higher level using knives and cutting mats)
3D surreal designs, bringing the principles of surrealism into installation.
In his collage novels such as Une Semaine de Bonté as pictured, Ernst utilised the potential of collage to scramble the order of reality. He placed his images into a purely visual narrative based on an illogical series that suggests greater meaning. To stress the independent existence of the imaginatively created world, these collages are seamless. Unlike Cubist collages, where the boundaries of each part remains clearly visible, Surrealist collages conceal the sutures between the constituent units, thereby emphasising the final image’s “reality” rather than the procedures and materials of its creation.
This separation of a cubist collage and a surreal collage paves a clear way to understand the difference between these two terms and summarises the difference in their ideologies.
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