🌌 “we too are stardust.” Born October 22, 2024

“we too are stardust” is a handcut paper collage telling the story of a human woman whose world has been flipped upside down. During her mortal battle with cancer, she rediscovered the knowledge of life for humanity and wisdom of the ancients. She refuses to let anything deter her from living and experiencing life. The woman feels the duality of fear and peace, immortalizing her strength and resilience.

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I created this collage as a donation-based commission for a friend’s mom who is currently battling stage 3 cancer. She gave me complete creative freedom with the request of making the collage based on her cancer journey. I wanted the collage to focus more on her human experience dealing with cancer without making it blatantly obvious that she’s going through cancer treatment.

I got inspiration for the collage’s title from the final chapter of the novel “Sophie’s World” by Jostein Gaarder, titled “The Big Bang” with the header saying, “…we too are stardust.”

One of the paragraphs in that chapter of the book really spoke to me: “The only way we can look out into space, then, is to look back in time. We can never know what the universe is like now. We only know what it was like then. When we look up at a star that is thousands of light years away, we are really traveling thousands of years back in the history of space.”

This year, I’ve been experimenting with a lot of different collage compositions to see what really fit my style and what didn’t. And some of my go to elements is the juxtaposition of space and faces.

It’s very comforting knowing that at the end of the day, we’re all made of the same substance and we all just go back home.

When we look up at the sky, we’re finding our way back to where we came from.