Collage

For Hood, “collage was a sheer joy.” She began working with this process after a trip to Egypt in 1981, where she came across various fabrics, Egyptian newspaper cuttings, and illustrations in Arabic and Chinese. Once home, these materials inspired a prodigiously prolific body of work that combined scraps of fabric, pages from newspapers and magazines, wrapping and craft papers, postcards, stamps, gold and silver leaf, and cut sections from her oil and watercolor paintings that she interspersed alongside swaths of bold color and abstract motifs.
Like her other works, Hood’s collages blend abstraction and realism, while alluding to various themes: travel and different cultures, nature, mysticism, the cosmos, the spiritual, and the psyche. Ranging from poetic and poignant, humorous and playful, and intense and somber, Hood’s mix of elements in each collage is a metaphorical signpost for the human condition.
More intimately scaled than her paintings, Hood harmoniously approached each piece with an eye toward texture, color, and content. Of her work in collage, Hood wrote, “A collage flatly says where we have been, each chosen and found scrap of paper represents a social history and picking out a paper sample corresponding to our experiences and spirit strung together make[s] a narrative memory.”