Featured Maker // Decolalia
Sarah Buckett
Decolalia
Sarah Buckett is the fabulous founder and creator behind the brand Decolalia. Sarah has been making collage art and illustration for about 13 years and began selling and sharing her work online around five years ago.
Sarah uses vintage and contemporary fashion magazines to create her collages and she sells greeting cards, prints and original pieces. Sarah creates every original piece completely by hand and feels very fortunate to have a designated studio space at her home.
Sarah is self-taught and has no formal art/design qualifications or training and she describes her career path as ‘winding with many detours!’ The biggest shift happened after having her children and Sarah left her previous job in education to be at home full time. Sarah took this as an opportunity to start over and felt a strong pull toward visual art, in particular paper collage. She began making cards and tentatively sold work at local art and craft fairs, collaborating with other mums and local artists/makers. Sarah often found this excruciating and really lacked confidence in her artistic voice. At that time, Sarah confesses being self-taught felt like a burden and she struggled to view her work as legitimate even though she loved what she was doing.
In 2016 Sarah plucked up courage to share her work online and used her Instagram page as a visual diary. This was a big turning point for her, and she began to create more regularly, with more purpose and connected with other artists.
Here, Sarah tells us a little more about her design and making processes, artists she admires and what it’s like to run your own creative business…
What inspires your design process?
I adore fashion and am a lifelong magazine collector, so this conveniently provides both my inspiration and my raw materials! I have strong emotional reactions to colour, so a particular shade or colour combination catches my eye and sparks the process. My more illustrative work is heavily inspired by vintage children’s books. They have a playfulness and simplicity that feels very joyful to me. My abstract pieces are slightly different. Here I work very intuitively, with no plan or attachment to how the final image will look.
Talk us through your making process from start to finish
My first stage is what I call harvesting; I work methodically through magazines and cut/rip out selected colours, patterns, or full images. I then loosely organise these into colour coded groups to reduce the chaos in my workspace. This process is incredibly relaxing and is often where ideas are born. What I select and why I select it can determine the end piece. I spend a long time cutting and arranging paper before sticking an image down. I photograph various layouts in case I move something and then cannot remember where it was. Next, I decide what size the final image will be and carefully start gluing. I use high tack PVA glue and brushes for my original pieces and then glue sticks for images that I then scan digitally to make cards or prints.
“There is a crucial moment when I know something is finished and I can step away and that always feels wonderful... it feels very instinctive, so I never know when it is actually going to happen.”
What is your most enjoyable part of creating? Is it the process or the final product itself?
It is very much a combination. It often feels like alchemy with paper collage, from the selection and combination of papers to the feelings they evoke once they are laid out in a particular arrangement. It truly feels like an image is making itself when all these elements come together. There is a crucial moment when I know something is finished and I can step away and that always feels wonderful. I don’t think there is ever a formula for that, it feels very instinctive, so I never know when it is actually going to happen.
Are there any artists or makers whose work you admire?
I love the work of Lisa Congdon and Danielle Krysa. They both talk candidly about creative confidence (and lack of) and share their personal, non-traditional journeys into the art world as a means of encouraging others. Because of them, being self-taught feels like a strength rather than a stigma. I am also a massive fan of Victoria Beckham, for her fashion/style aesthetic but also her courage to design with no formal fashion training (and a lot of public criticism) simply because she believed she had that creative talent, and that it was her calling.
What is the hardest thing about running a business on your own? And what is the best thing?
One of the hardest things is having no colleagues and one of the best things is having no colleagues! I do miss aspects of being part of a team; the social and creative energy, different perspectives to learn from and structured, defined working hours. Connecting with other freelance artists can be a challenge and I definitely need to do more of that.
On the plus side, the more I have embraced quietly working in solitude, the more authentic my artwork feels and of course it is brilliant to have the flexibility to fit work around family life.
Visit Sarah’s website & online shop: decolalia.bigcartel.com
Follow on Instagram: @decolalia
