Nothing is more discomfiting than sitting in a jail cell having broken a socially imposed code of conduct. Yet each person awaiting in the 6’ x 8’ concrete jail cell deserves not humiliation but dignity.

For me, creating a collage of a jail cell is an expression of humanity in situ, a meditative process of cutting, pasting, and assembling disparate materials to form an intention. It is also a codified language that allows me to pull from a variety of sources and condense them into a single image. A cathartic violence to the process eschews calmness that allows the broken-up pieces to be restructured while remaining fractured. My hope is that elements of poetic abstraction mixed with critically charged content allows the jail cell collages to live as hybrid portraits of otherness, isolation, diversity, and systematic injustice.

Art by Glynn B. Cartledge

Untitled Jail Cell Collage No. 39