I’ve started to realise that my brain doesn’t think in straight lines. It thinks in collages.

People often ask where ideas come from, as if creativity arrived like a lightning strike. I wish I had an answer that simple, but the truth is that’s never how it has worked for me. An idea usually begins as a fragment: a sentence I overheard in a café, a photograph I took months ago, a melody that refuses to leave my head, a line underlined in a book, a strange dream, a colour, a building or a conversation that lasted only a few minutes but stayed with me for weeks. On their own, none of these things seem important. Most of them don’t even make sense together.

But my mind doesn’t seem interested in keeping them separate. It quietly collects them without asking permission, storing them somewhere I can’t see. Then, sometimes days later and sometimes months later, something unexpected happens. Two fragments suddenly find each other. Then a third. Then another. And what looked like a collection of unrelated pieces slowly becomes a single idea.

That’s why I’ve always loved collage. Not because it’s surreal, and not because it’s visually interesting. Because it feels honest. When I make a collage, I’m not creating something out of nothing. I’m bringing together pieces that already existed, waiting for the right moment to meet. In a strange way, making art feels less like inventing something new and more like discovering connections that were already there all along.

Maybe that’s why I don’t believe creativity is about having better ideas than everyone else. I think it’s about paying attention. About collecting small things that most people would forget. About letting them stay with you long enough for them to start talking to each other.

Maybe that’s why collage has always felt so natural to me. It isn’t just something I make.

It’s the closest visual representation of the way my mind has always worked.