Collaging Prison Cells Workshop
This workshop is about examining the 6’ x 8’ space the government has chosen for locking up citizens. In this workshop participants will make a collage of a prison cell from everyday materials including paper, glue, scissors, markers, and magazines. This hour-long, hands-on workshop will start with a brief presentation during which participants will be encouraged to begin their creation. During the making of the collages, we will share ideas and comments, examples of cells, of collages, and otherwise talk about the emotional and physical impact of inhabiting a cage for years. Participants will have the opportunity to share their creations and thoughts on mass incarceration, punishment, and prison life, both in the chat and at the end of the session.
Materials List
Paper, glue, scissors, magazines or other printed material, colored pencils or pens, or paint
Glynn Cartledge Bio
An artist who spent over twenty-five years as a criminal lawyer, Glynn Cartledge’s work examines the justice system. Her work includes collages-making of prison and jail cells.
She cuts up criminal pleadings from her own files. She incorporates childhood photographs from the formerly incarcerated; she manipulates disparate materials to construct the collaged cells. Deconstructing and reassembling, while coming to terms with utopian ideas of justice in the face of its continued, inevitable misinterpretation and all-to-often conspicuous absence provides the emotional context of the cells.
In making collages, Glynn is expressing fictions that society produces about those incarcerated, whose emotional utterances are normally ignored. Collaging these jail cells becomes a meditative process of cutting, pasting, and assembling to form an intention and speak about the inequities. It is also a codified language that allows her to pull from a variety of relatable sources and condense them into a single image about the imprisoned. This cathartic violence applied to the materials allows the broken-up pieces to be restructured while remaining fractured, as the people are. Glynn’s hope is that elements of poetic abstraction mixed with critically charged content allows the one-off cell collages to live as hybrid portraits of otherness, isolation, diversity, and systematic injustice.