In Autumn 2025, the Binks Hub partnered with artist Clementine Carriere to deliver a vibrant four-part collage workshop series at Edinburgh Futures Institute. The sessions ran monthly from September to December, offering an in-depth exploration of collage as a creative and research tool.
Each two-hour workshop focused on a distinct theme:
- Introduction: The history and significance of collage as an artistic medium.
- Mapping: Using cartography and visual storytelling in collage.
- Questions: Combining conceptual illustration with collage to communicate complex ideas.
- Findings: Experimenting with data visualisation through collage to uncover patterns and insights.
The sessions blended practical techniques with conceptual thinking, encouraging participants to translate personal or research ideas into compelling visual narratives. Sustainability was central, with recycled and eco-friendly materials used throughout.
This series reflects the Binks Hub’s commitment to arts-based methods and co-creative research, offering space for creativity, reflection, and knowledge-making.
Reflections
Over the course of four sessions, participants explored collage through mapping, conceptual illustration, and data visualisation. The sessions were designed to help them understand how collage can be used to translate information and convey complex ideas into compelling visual narratives using books and magazine cut-outs, postcards and colourful paper stocks. Participants were guided through structure exercises to built creative confidence and developed practical knowledge through hands-on experimentation.
It was a joy to see participants develop their skillsets, confidence, and creative practice as they experimented with a range of techniques to produce a diverse series of compositions across all four sessions. Participants built on their knowledge and experience throughout the programme: starting with playful and experimental outcomes in the first session, and finishing with final pieces that demonstrated a methodical approach to translating complex information into clear visual narratives. Each participant developed a personal toolkit of practical techniques that I hope they will continue to implement and draw upon in their own research and creative practice.
— Clementine, Designer & Workshop Facilitator
@concretenaturestudio
I have always found collage to be a very organic and instinctive art form. I have enjoyed using it for years but these workshops really helped me to understand how I might use collage to help think about things in a new way, and to use visualisations to conceptualise things differently. Clementine was brilliant at helping us to engage with the history of the art form in order to develop our practise in new ways. Working with her was another example for me about how valuable it can be for social scientists to engage with different ways of knowing and representing the world.
— Autumn, participant
This collage represents the flow from a pre-modernity culture with a closer connection to the natural world, towards a modernist era that has overseen the gradual isolation and loss of people’s voices through the societal systems and structures we create for ourselves.
— Scott, participant
