In the Texture of Things: Collage as a Site of Material Constraint and Possibility

Abstract

This article explores the affective and material complexities of creating arts-based artefacts to explore and represent sexual violence. It does so through attending to both the materials used and the embodied practices of those making them. Focusing on collage, it examines how the physical properties of materials mediate what can be imagined, simultaneously enabling expression and constraining it within familiar visual vocabularies often shaped by state, security, and punitive logics. I argue that materiality operates not only through objects but through the bodies, gestures, and decisions of makers, shaping what can be imagined. Through engagement with Nancy Naples’ (2003) formative work on survivor discourse alongside novel empirical data and cultural texts, the article makes the subtle yet significant contention that attending to these entangled materialities—of both maker and medium—reveals how friction between imaginative intent and material affordances can generate methodological insights, open alternative futures, and disrupt dominant discourses.