I love Corey Moortgat’s work. I first found out about her on a Stampington magazine. I can’t remember which one of the many Stampington titles it was or the issue date—but I do remember exactly what Corey wrote in her piece because her words really resonated with me. She believes that we should try and make our collages personal. Nothing wrong with using pretty pictures of 19th century girls with crowns and wings, she said, but if you want your art to be meaningful, you should try and use images of your daughter, your son, your husband.
The end result is a piece of work that has the all the artistic challenge of a collage and all the emotional significance of a scrapbook page. Which is exactly what I try to do with my stuff, so I was overjoyed to find a fellow soul. Except that, given my passion for genealogy and family history, many of my collage turned scrapbook pieces (or is it scrapbook turned collage?) use period images of my grandmothers, my grandfathers and their families.
I try to push beyond the somewhat arid boundaries of genealogy—names, birth dates and family tree branches—to try and bring out the people from whom I descend.
I am working on a family altered book now, a present for my 91-year-old great aunt. It tries to capture moments in the life of her grandparents, her parents, her brothers and sisters. It is a labour of love, because I need to find the right pictures, and, where I can, some anecdotes from the life of the forebears that are starting to populate my altered pages. But the end result is, as Corey would say, so much more satisfying.

Work in progress: the page devoted to my great-grandfather Raffaele Alfredo (nicknamed Caffeo for his coffee-drinking habit) on the altered book