After attending a collage exhibition at Collapse Gallery, I was so inspired that I found myself wanting to revisit the medium. I had been hoarding random images in my studio, waiting for this opportunity, and I dug into them with joy, curiosity, and no idea what the hell I planned to do with that energy.

An image from an old kitten-themed calendar jumped out at me. I did some light doodling to transform a cat in a teacup into… a cat wearing glasses and driving a teacup? I cut this out with an X-acto knife, set it on my desk, and stared at it for a moment.

The cat looked lonely. To paraphrase my 3 year-old niece, he “needed a friend”. I found a teddy bear in a piece of art that had appeared in a thrift shop frame. I cut it out with an X-acto knife, and I was delighted to see that it could straddle the side of the teacup as a passenger. It needed a little extra “oomph”, so I outlined it in black ink.

I tried several different backgrounds, eventually deciding on a pink, glow-in-the-dark page from a USPS promotional package about the power of direct mail. (This was hoarded from my 10-year career in marketing, because some of the images were quite beautiful.) I cut down the page to 5 x 7 issues. When I placed the cat and bear, I was dissatisfied with their appearance, so I pasted them onto a white sheet of paper and cut out a thin border.

The pink color reminded me of Mean Girls, but I didn’t get the impression that this cat and bear wanted to go shopping. Immediately, I thought back to the Women’s March in Boston and remembered one of the signs someone was holding—”Get in loser! We’re dismantling the patriarchy.”

It felt fitting, so I created a little text bubble on scrap paper and glued it on. Once dry, I placed it in the frame that the bear originally appeared in.