When Cutting Up Your Art Is Actually Making Art

I saw this comic recently that stopped me cold. Four panels of someone reorganizing their space, saying "I wanted to assert control over my existence," then realizing it came from anger. The final panel: "No this is precisely how art is made."

Precisely.

For over a decade, I've been cutting up my art. Shredding thousands of photographs. Slicing through paintings dating back twenty-five years. Buzzing off my hair and preserving it in jars. Dismantling mannequins I'd painted to represent my virtual avatar.

Sometimes I called it mixed media. Collage. Process work.

Sometimes I was lying.

The Thing About Control

When your body betrays you with cancer, when society tells you your plus-size frame is unacceptable, when aging feels like failure in a youth-obsessed culture—you control what you can control. You can't control the tumor, but you can control the scissors.

The comic nails something I've been circling around but couldn't name. That urge to reorganize when everything feels chaotic isn't separate from art-making. It IS art-making. The need to assert control over your existence through rearranging, cutting, reconstructing—that's not the opposite of creativity. That's where creativity lives.

When Care Becomes Harm (And Back Again)

Someone in a meeting said something that made me rethink everything: "It's like self-harm through beauty." They were talking about cosmetic procedures, but it hit me sideways. How many ways do we hurt ourselves while appearing to care for ourselves?

My cutting practice lives in this complicated space. Sometimes it's meditative transformation. Sometimes it's compulsive destruction. Often it's both simultaneously. The difference comes down to awareness, intention, what voice is driving the scissors.

When I create something and then cut it up, am I:

• Processing how criticism cut me up as a child?

• Enacting the belief that anything good I create must be destroyed?

• Taking control of the destruction before someone else can reject it?

• Genuinely transforming something into something new?

All of these things. Different days, different motivations.

The Archive of Fragments

Now I have cut up everything. My flat files are empty. I stand surrounded by thousands of pieces of my former selves—fragments of paintings, shredded photographs, cut-up mannequins, even my own hair preserved in jars.

This accumulation of fragments isn't destruction for destruction's sake. It's the raw evidence of a decade-long meditation on letting go. Each piece tells part of the story of my de(con)struction, from early paintings about body image to recent photographs documenting my cancer journey.

The Methodology of Making Space

What my practice of deconstruction reveals is a methodology for processing trauma, loss, and societal pressure that goes beyond individual healing. Each act of cutting exposes how identity is artificially constructed and maintained. How our attachments to past selves can trap us. How destruction can be generative rather than merely destructive.

The cutting taught me that transformation requires space—literal and metaphysical. Sometimes we must destroy what we were to become who we are.

But awareness changes everything. Even when the behaviors stay the same for now, consciousness plants seeds. The scissors are still in my art supplies, but now I ask: "Is this an act of care or an act of harm?" Sometimes the answer isn't clear. Sometimes care and harm get tangled up like Christmas lights you can't untangle.

But asking the question creates a pause. A moment to consider motivation instead of moving on autopilot.

Revolution Through Process

My cutting practice isn't just personal—it's political. In a world that tells women to shrink, bodies like mine to disappear, aging to happen quietly, the very act of cutting becomes an assertion of agency. I may not be able to control how society sees my body, but I can control how I interact with my own creative output.

Sometimes the most radical act is being gentle with ourselves. Sometimes revolution looks like not cutting up the beautiful thing we just created. Sometimes healing means recognizing that we deserve care, comfort, kindness. Especially from ourselves.

What Comes After Recognition

I don't have all the answers. But I'm asking better questions.

What forms of disguised self-harm do you recognize in your own life? How do we learn to distinguish between genuine care and harm dressed up as care? What would it look like to honor the hurt without adding to it?

My practice suggests one possibility: Make the invisible visible. Cut up what needs cutting. Rebuild from fragments. Take up space. Refuse to stay small.

The comic was right. This is precisely how art is made—from the messy human need to assert control over our existence, to make meaning from chaos, to transform pain into something that takes up space in the world.

My cutting practice becomes a powerful metaphor for anyone learning to distinguish between self-harm disguised as self-care and genuine transformation. We live in a culture that profits from our self-hatred, sells us expensive ways to express it.

Recognizing this doesn't make us victims—it makes us informed participants in our own healing.

What pieces of yourself are you ready to reconstruct?

My studio as it is June 22, 2025. Because tomorrow I may re-organize it... maybe.