The joy of piecing it together

Most days, Taryn Chase Jackson might be found at her desk, writing grant proposals or combing through reports for non-profits and other clients from around the country. In between deadlines, however, she turns to a creative outlet she’s only in recent years become to understand as an artform.

For Jackson, collage started as a way to “play.” Though she returns again and again to the favorite pastime because of the childlike joy it sparks, she’s also begun to take it more seriously thanks to the encouragement of other artists in the Shoals.

This year, her work will once again be part of the annual Arts Alive Festival in Florence, a juried show that has become a cornerstone of the Shoals’ creative calendar. While the festival offers a public stage for her work, the story behind it is one shaped by decades of practice, a late-blooming artistic confidence, and a growing desire to build community around an often-overlooked medium.

“I’ve really been doing collage my whole life. I was a punk kid in the 1990s,” she said with a laugh. “It was the era of DIY zines. You know, the idea was to sort of cut up magazines and paper and collect random scraps to decorate things. So, it’s just always been something I’ve done.”

Still, for much of her life, collage existed in the background. Jackson pursued writing academically, earning an MFA in creative nonfiction, and eventually built a career as a grant writing consultant, working remotely with organizations across the country. Art remained present, but it wasn’t yet central.

That began to change after she moved to the Shoals in 2018.

Originally from western New York, Jackson had lived in Virginia and North Carolina before relocating with her husband, a Russellville native, to his home region. Not long after arriving, she connected with a local art circle led by Tim Stevenson, an established artist in the Shoals arts community.

Surrounded by painters and more traditional visual artists, Jackson leaned into the medium she already knew.

“I just started with collage and began refining my visual voice,” she said. “That’s when it started to take off.”

By 2020, she was exhibiting her work publicly for the first time. Since then, her collages have appeared in shows across Alabama andbeyond,includingexhibitions in San Francisco, California, Michigan and New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work — often surreal, sometimes playful, and frequently rooted in themes of women’s experiences and social equity — has found a growing audience.

But Jackson is quick to clarify that she isn’t chasing a full-time career in art.

“The commercial aspect isn’t my primary interest,” she said. “Exhibiting work is a way to get people to see your work. It’s another way I’ve grown my community.”

The instinct to use art to build connections has becomecentraltoJackson’s work in recent years. It’s also what inspired her latest endeavor, the Shoals Collage Collective.

Launched in January, the collective is a free, meetup held on the fourth Thursday of each month at the Helen Keller Public Library in Tuscumbia. For two hours, participants gather to cut, paste and experiment, using materials Jackson provides or bringing their own.

“That was my resolution for 2026. I wanted to make collage accessible,” she said. “On social media, I would see larger cities like Chicago, the Twin Cities or New Orleans hosting these collage collectives. I’d get a little jealous, like, ‘Oh my goodness! They have a little community of people who just get together and play every month.’ Then I realized, there’s nothing stopping me from making it happen here in the Shoals.”

The response has been steadily growing as word has gotten out. Attendees often return the next month with a friend, and many of those attendees don’t consider themselves visual artists at all.

“A lot of people who come are poets or musicians or they have other creative endeavors,” Jackson said. “They are coming and really enjoying it. That’s why I love collage. You know, with drawing or painting, people can be very self-critical. In collage, there are no wrong answers. It really is about having fun.”

That inviting nature is part of what makes the medium so attractive to others like Jackson, who only dabble in the arts, but it’s also what makes the medium so misunderstood, she said.

“Some people think collage is just pasting things together,” she said. “But there’s a real process behind it. You’re creating meaning by putting images together that don’t belong together.”

She describes her approach as intuitive and exploratory. Often without knowing how a piece will turn out when she sits at the table with her scissors and materials, she experiments with picture combinations in what she calls an “auditioning” process.

“It’s like reversing a jigsaw puzzle without the box,” she said. “It feels like it makes sense once I’m finished, but at the beginning, it starts with lots of random bits.”

That sense-making can take many forms. Some of Jackson’s work leans into humor and absurdity, embracing the inherent strangeness of collage. Other pieces delve into more thoughtful territory, exploring themes like grief, identity and social justice.

Two of her works selected for this year’s Arts Alive Festival reflect that range.

One, titled “Holding Space,” emerged while she listened in on an online workshop about grief.

“It was about disenfranchised grief,” she recalled the moment that sparked inspiration for next collage. “It was about grief that isn’t socially acceptable, which can include grief over your pet or grief over a partner that your family doesn’t recognize, or if you grieve ‘too long.’ So, I was thinking about how our friends hold space for us when we’re going through something like that. The piece itself is exploring that idea of community during times of grief.”

The second work, “Stream of Unconsciousness,” explores the surreal landscape of dreams, featuring a central figure surrounded by shifting, symbolic imagery.

“I often think about our dreaming life, and its purpose for us as humans who are healing and working out a lot of different things during our wakeful hours,” she said.

Together, the two collages capture the dual nature of her work, which can be both playful and pensive.

“I do feel like the images sort of guide me,” she said. “I’m sure it has some to do with my surroundings or the mood I’m in as well, but even when I’m making a work that ends up having a more serious theme, I feel there’s a satisfaction in bringing something together that is meaningful from literal scraps of paper.”

That balance is part of what drew her to the Arts Alive Festival in the first place.

“I think it surprises people that it draws so many people from out of town, and that the quality of the work is so high,” she said. “It’s really a gem of a show.”

The festival holds a special place in Jackson’s artistic journey. She first participated in 2022, and it was at that event where she made her first art sale.

“It was a piece called ‘The Experiment,’” she recalled. “It was an image of a cat with a female person inside an aquarium, and she had a fish for a head. It was very playful and sort of hubris.”

Beyond the festival weekend, the exhibition remains open for an extended period, allowing more visitors to engage with the work — a feature Jackson particularly appreciates.

For her, events like Arts Alive are about more than exposure. When she joined the Alabama Women’s Caucus for Art, it was also about building a stronger, more inclusive creative community, especially in the Shoals.

“I’d love to see a dedicated collage exhibition here someday,” she said. “Some people consider collage as a less-skillful or less talent-laden artform, but I think it can be elevated. You can achieve those same concepts that painting and drawing are trying to achieve. It’s an odd practice, but it’s one that I think deserves a rightful place in the world.”