Downtime Interview w/ allison anne
“I love the immediacy of collage, the way you can weave in the ephemeral bits of our lives, and get started with anything you might have on hand.”
— allison anne, 2026
1) LOCATION?
I live and work in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA (unceded Očhéthi Šakówiŋ land). 🇺🇸
2) HOW MANY YEARS HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING WITH COLLAGE?
Found paper has been part of my creative process for as long as I can remember—some of my earliest memories of making involve making my own paper dolls from magazines, creating paper dioramas, and using scrap print-outs from my dad’s government job as substrate for my projects. My mom was an arts educator & classroom teacher, so I grew up around a stash of material in our basement—I was always eager to get down there to explore. While I focused on drawing for many years, I started to get more interested in collage in my late 20s when I got interested in mail art, and began re-incorporating found paper into my work more and more often, usually combined with a hand-drawn component. As I got more involved with mail art, artists like Musicmaster, Jon Foster, and Allan Bealy really opened my mind to “collage thinking”, and it became my core creative focus about ten years ago, at about age 30. Now, it really is at the center of everything I do!
3) WHY IS COLLAGE AN APPEALING MEDIUM?
I love the immediacy of collage, the way you can weave in the ephemeral bits of our lives, and get started with anything you might have on hand. Collage challenges you to see the possibility in anything, and is such a boundless medium. It’s shaped by your worldview, but it reshapes and recontextualises it, too. The medium offers a chance to further interrogate, reclaim, and broaden personal and cultural perspectives while exploring new ones, and it certainly shapes my thinking (and fuels my curiosity). My visual artmaking practice is a diary, and is a major part of how I process my experiences and make sense of my internal world through bits of the external.
4) WHO ARE THE BIGGEST INFLUENCES?
This is a tough one to answer, because there are so many things that influence and inspire me. I find a lot of inspiration in taking walks in the city while observing trash, texture, ephemeral bits, and the tension of the natural world in urban settings (Minneapolis is a green city, with many parks and lakes). I’ve always been interested in art history, and visit museums and galleries often, and make a point of it if I’m travelling. Zines, mail art, experimental music, and experimentation are all big influences!
5) ANALOG VS DIGITAL, WHAT ARE THE PROS & CONS OF EACH?
The materiality of the analog approach is so central to my work. For me, focusing on the possibilities and constraints presented by physical materials are where the most interesting breakthroughs happen, and are the projects I feel most satisfied with (and challenged by). For a long time, I was pretty strict with myself about making artwork by analog means specifically because I have to do so much digital graphic design for work. I was so burned out, and I really needed to disrupt that with a different approach. While I do use some digital processes from time to time for zine projects or collaborative work now, it’s pretty rare to not have some kind of physical component in whatever I’m working on.
6) WHAT ARE THREE TIPS FOR SOMEONE STARTING OUT IN COLLAGE?
Look around for varied materials, and try a bit of everything (different weights and finishes of paper, found objects, household substrates, different adhesives). Play and experimentation are very important, and putting some parameters on things (i.e. using a limited number of elements or giving yourself a time limit) can lead to amazing creative breakthroughs!
Perfectionism can be an albatross, and I know that intimately! Consider the possibilities posed by chance (and the moments that might feel like a mistake). I’m a big fan of the Oblique Strategies cards by Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt, and think often of the card that reads “Honor thy error as a hidden intention”. Learning patience with oneself is part of the creative process!
Be your own archivist. Take well-lit, high-quality photos of your work (or better yet, scan them at a high resolution such as 600dpi). If you’re interested in making your own zine project or submitting your work to shows, publications, and other opportunities, you’ll be glad to have that personal resource to draw from! Additionally you can learn a lot from your past work. I look through my digital archive of past work with some regularity, learning from my own processes.
7) HOW DO YOU SPEND YOUR DOWNTIME?
Most things I do seem to be interwoven with my creative practice. My hands always have to be busy, so I’m pretty frequently folding zines and looking for material in my studio, ripping up magazines while watching a film or something. I love walking, and am always looking at the surrounds, taking photos. I really love to do research on all sorts of subjects, digging around in the public domain, jotting stuff down in notebooks, and working on correspondence & mail art. I got really into rubber stamps again after attending a mail art congress in Minneapolis last fall. For leisure, I love spending time with my cats, friends & family, going to live music (especially experimental music), traveling, watching movies (especially at our great local theatres, like the Trylon Cinema).
8) WHERE DO YOU SEE YOUR ART PRACTICE HEADING?
I couldn’t possibly guess, but collage seems to be what brings everything together, that’s what’s at the core! I’m interested in working on some more intensive book art projects, which I haven’t really had time for recently, and I’ve also been working on doing some more writing about creativity and process in zine format. I’m quite interested in asemic writing too, which I’d like to pursue further as an element of collage, zine, and book art projects.
unfounded clarity, Handcut paper collage on matboard, 8x8 inches, 2025
9) WHICH THREE ARTISTS SHOULD WE CHECK OUT?
Brado (@hmmonmyway), whose work has felt entwined with mine for years. It feels like we’re in this constant creative conversation, even when we haven’t gotten together to work on anything in awhile.
JG Orudjev (@j.g.orudjev.art), who is a master of association, dimension, and omission in her work, which is so painterly.
Genie Hien Tran (@fettugenie), whose large-scale / installation collage works exploring home, identity, and belonging are completely arresting.
10) WHAT MUSIC ARE YOU LOVING RIGHT NOW?
Music is a frequent companion in the studio, on walks, while riding the bus, and at home. Recently, I’ve been revisiting my longstanding love of Depeche Mode and putting a lot of old concert footage on (there’s so much available on YouTube). I’ve been going to a lot of experimental music & noise shows, and listen to quite a bit of ambient music too. Audio collage interests me quite a bit, but it isn’t something that I’ve tried!
11) ANY UP-AND-COMING EXHIBITIONS OR PROJECTS WE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT?
I’ve been working on a large publishing project with my collaborator, the collagist & writer Jeremy P. Bushnell (@jeremypbushnell)—an anthology series called COLOUR INTO FOCUS that publishes work by LGBTQIA2S+ artists worldwide who use collage in their practice. It’s a collaboration through our small press NONMACHINABLE and Twin Cities Collage Collective, a group I co-founded in 2017. We’ve just released the second of eight volumes, which is very exciting! What a treat and an honor to work with so many incredible artists worldwide. It’s larger in scope than any other publishing project I’ve worked on before. You can learn more about the project at @nonmachinable on Instagram or at shop.nonmachinable.com.
I’m looking forward to attending & participating in Making Meaning, the collage symposium at the Vassar Institute for the Liberal Arts in Poughkeepsie, NY from July 22-24, 2026, organized by Andrea Burgay and Monica Church. I’m such a fan of Andrea’s work and publishing projects, and it’s been such a delight to get to know Monica and her artwork through this project. I feel very honored (and humbled) to have been invited to speak about my publishing practice there—my presentation is titled Publishing as Personal Perspective & Collective Care, and I’ll be discussing how publishing is a vital part of my practice and part of a praxis of care & collaboration. We’ll also have a variety of publications at the book fair, spanning offerings from NONMACHINABLE, Twin Cities Collage Collective, and my solo work. I’m very excited to be able to connect with so many folks I’ve met through the shared language of this medium! There’s so much amazing programming planned, and you can learn more about the event at transformingcollage.com.
See more 👀
Instagram: @allisonannecollage
allisonanne.com
twincitiescollagecollective.com
nonmachinable.com
