We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Joey Relaford-doyle a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Joey, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

The first thing that comes to mind is my Sad Girls Series, which is a collection of four collages that I made in 2023 using satellite images of rivers, all around the theme of grief. I’ve experienced a couple tough losses of people close to me, and grief has been a very present part of my life for the past decade. One of the weird things about grief is all the contradictions within it, and before I started making art I really struggled with accepting all these things that felt like they couldn’t all be true at the same time – like how even though grief is excruciating, there is also something so beautiful about feeling the full extent of how much you love someone through the hugeness of their absence. But then you feel guilty for thinking there’s anything good about that person being gone, and then like you’re crazy for having all these different feelings at once. So for me, one of the hardest parts of dealing with grief was feeling like I had to “figure out” which feeling was right, and like I never would be able to do that.

Years ago, after my first experience of loss but before I started making art, this recurring idea kept popping into my head: that grief is a river flowing through the universe, and you only get to discover it by being “tapped in”. There was something beautiful there, this feeling of expansion, of being connected to something bigger than me. But at the same time, I couldn’t reconcile that feeling with how sad and awful everything felt – how could this horrible thing be beautiful? Nevertheless, that image of the river stuck with me, and after I had been making art for a while I decided to try to see if I could capture that river in images. It was important to me that the rivers I used were real, not imagined or metaphorical, and so I cut out satellite photographs of real rivers and turned them into tears flowing through various human figures set against cosmic backdrops. I remember everything coming together so quickly – sometimes making a collage can feel fussy or overworked, but in this case it felt like all the different pieces were truly meant to be together. And more than that, seeing the completed pieces shifted something in me. They were so sad and so beautiful, and it finally felt simple to see that of course those things don’t contradict each other. So that’s why the Sad Girls mean so much to me – they changed my relationship to my grief, and to myself. They made me love being a Sad Girl.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Of course! I’m Joey (she/they), a San Diego-based analog collage artist. I started making art to express feelings that I couldn’t put into words, and these days I use art to explore mysterious, confusing, or overwhelming emotions. My favorite thing about making art is that it lets me capture the duality and dissonance of so many of life’s experiences in a way that feels whole, clear, and beautiful.

I’m relatively new to making art – I first started dabbling in 2020 during Covid lockdown, and started focusing on it more seriously in 2023. At first I was trying out a few different mediums, but I landed on collage after a vision boarding night with a friend. We weren’t trying to make anything serious, but after putting the different pieces together I realized that I loved what I had made – it felt like it captured something about me that I hadn’t been able to say before. So that hooked me, and these days I work exclusively in paper-based analog collage. I really enjoy that analog collage makes use of images that already exist, and reimagines them to create something completely new. I also love the constraints that the medium imposes. It makes things more challenging – sometimes I wish a particular image was bigger, or a different color, or that I could find a photo of exactly what I see in my head. But the act of working with what I have and finding ways to create within the constraints is really gratifying. It also leaves me open to so many surprises – instead of trying to create an image that I’ve already imagined, I play around with things that speak to me until something emerges that feels like “the thing”. I find that it’s a great way to make art in a way that also involves a lot of self-discovery.

Besides making art, I am a cognitive scientist and educator. My background is in psychology, linguistics, and mathematics. I like thinking about different representational systems and how they shape our thought and the way we move through the world. My research in cognitive science definitely shapes the way I approach art. I really appreciate its unique communicative capacities and how it conveys meanings in ways completely different from symbolic systems. I also love teaching – I am a former high school math teacher and today I work in higher education.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The biggest thing I had to unlearn was that artists are people who are good at art. Growing up I naturally took to math and language, and I was a very verbal/analytical kid. Of course, that then got validated and reinforced in school, where those kinds of thinking are pretty important. So I came to see myself as someone who was good at math and good with words – but not good at art. I couldn’t draw very well, I never liked the things I made, so I just figured that wasn’t for me.

I’m very glad that I did eventually try making art. What brought me to it, actually, were some challenging life experiences and resulting feelings that I felt incapable of expressing in words, or analyzing to figure out what was “right”. I talked a lot with my therapist about how much I was struggling to make sense of things, and she encouraged me to try art as another way to express myself. I resisted for years, thinking what’s the point? I’m not good at art anyway so how could that possibly help? I wanted to “stick to my strengths”, so I went in circles for a long time.

Eventually a few things came together that knocked me off that cycle. First, Covid – when we were locked down I had lots of time to myself so I started watercoloring and making collages just to pass the hours. I was also thinking a lot about internalized capitalism and how we’re all socialized to put so much of our self worth into what we produce and how “good” it is. So I wanted to resist that by not giving a shit about whether what I made was good, and just enjoy making things. And at the same time I was becoming closer with a dear friend of mine, Krista Cuellar, who is an incredible artist and a very strong advocate of the idea that art is for everyone. Their encouragement and enthusiasm for the things I was starting to make motivated me to keep going, and eventually I started making things that I really loved – not because they were “good”, but because they captured the feelings that I had been unable to express in words for so long. The feeling of self-expression was addictive…I finally understood what my therapist had been so kindly trying to tell me.

So now I understand that artists aren’t people who are good at art. Artists are people who use art to express themselves. And there is so much value in that, because there are things you can do with art that simply aren’t possible in words or symbols.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

I’m going to cheat and give you two. The first is when something that I’m making surprises me. Sometimes I have a vision in mind for what I want to make, but then as the pieces come together it starts to feel more like discovering something that’s already there, waiting for me. Those are my favorite pieces to make. The other thing is hearing from people what they see in my images, or how one of my pieces makes them feel. Most things that I make feel very personal to me, but when I share them with other people they take on new meanings, and I love that. I really enjoy that aspect of art, that it’s not about someone “getting” what you’re trying to say, but finding out what other meanings are there waiting for different eyes to see them. In that way art has really helped me let go of the idea of right answers, which so often gets in the way of seeing and feeling what’s there.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @joeyartyart

Image Credits

Sam McCubbin