January 2021 Winners

Art Prof Clara Lieu and Teaching Artist Lauryn Welch announce the results of the 2021 January Art Dare: “Paper Trail Collages,” where participants were asked to make a personal map of how they read a newspaper using traditional or digital collage.

Watch the Announcement

Prize Winner

Crosby Morrow (USA)
@kind2creatures

While admittedly I am not a newspaper reader (although working on this made me want to get into doing the crosswords!), I think I use it almost everyday. Whether I’m using it to build an armature for my newest sculpture, or just using it to keep pastel and paint off my table, it’s a constant tool I use.
This plant is loosely based off of two real houseplants I have, my Syngoniums and Aglaonemas! The leaves are just made of different cuttings of a newspaper, and the stems are just paper tape around pieces of wire. The substrate you see is ripped pieces from a brown paper bag that I dyed and curled to be like mulch or orchid bark. The pot is made of exposed cardboard that I coated with a mixture of white chalk paint and wood glue, to give it a ceramic-ish appearance.

Honorable Mention

Sarah C. McGill (Canada)
@snapsketchsnooze

This collage is less a map and more a bumpy terrain crossed with a self portrait reflecting how I’ve read the news over my life. The relatively calm background is some of the Sunday comics I enjoyed as a kid. As a young adult, I read mostly the life and opinion sections: there’s clips of these my face.
Since 2020, reading the news has been an overwhelming whirlpool of COVID-19 stories, daily reports of case numbers, and other bad news. I follow the daily CBC Morning Brief and Coronavirus Brief on my phone, so I built repetitive clips of these over the waves of hair, as my hair has been growing long during social distancing.
Sources used: the woman illustration is part of a Globe & Mail column illustrated by April dela Noche Milne; the comics Mutts, Calvin & Hobbs, Blondie, Beetle Bailey, Mother Goose and Grimm, Hagar the Horrible (there were so many more I could have added!); plus various photos and clippings from CBC.ca news.