Yasmin Sison’s Storybook Collages is a collection of works that she has been doing all year. For her, doing collages, which she learned to do in Prof. Chabet’s fine arts class in college, is just so intuitive and fun to do, allowing her to tap all her creative juices.
Her background as a pre-school teacher is a strong influence, too, in her choice of colors and imagery. There is indeed a wealth of inspiration in children and in children’s books. So, like a child with all the available art materials (such as crayons, oil pastel, watercolor, and acrylic) and found objects (including cut-out storybooks) within her reach, Sison doesn’t hesitate in exploring the boundaries of her imagination. “My goal is simply to have fun while making the works. There isn’t one work that stands out as the representative piece. I conceptualized it as a series of works that can be viewed as one whole big piece, like an installation.”
In a way, she sees it as a continuation of her past collage works, enriching and refining her ideas along the way, such as adding a three-dimensionality aspect in her most recent pieces. It all started when she made two or three pieces a day just to jumpstart her artistic instincts until she was able to complete a whole set for an exhibit.
Sison decided to pursue visual arts full-time after having a baby, realizing that while teaching was fulfilling, she had to choose just one career to give her enough time with her family as well. “[Art] is really what I wanted to do.” She plans to continue doing more collages in the future. “It’s fun, relaxing, and I get to use other parts of my brain than the ones I mainly use in painting and drawing.”
