Hannah “Honey” Jaeger builds collages the way some people tell secrets… slowly, deliberately, with just enough left unsaid to draw you closer. These days she works out of her Los Angeles home studio, surrounded by towers of Pl***oy, Life, and National Geographic magazines; art and architecture books; picture books on everything from clowns to cathedrals; landscapes, science, and whatever else thri
ft shops cough up. Every fragment she cuts free is alchemized into a new narrative. As a kinetic learner and visual thinker, she’s not just arranging pictures on a page, she’s translating thought, feeling, and memory into something you can’t look away from. She grew up in a conservative religious household, where shame and “purity” were handed to her like birthrights. Losing her mother at age eleven carved out a silence too big for words, so she turned to images instead. Art became her language, the only way to process grief and make sense of a world that kept insisting on obedience and order. Now, through collage, she both mirrors and dismantles those systems… playing with power, subverting cultural myths, turning trauma into punchlines that sting. Her work doesn’t tiptoe around the hard parts, it delivers them cheekily, like a sucker punch wrapped in lace. At ArtCenter, her world cracked open. Not just in the classroom, but in nightclubs, on dance floors, under disco balls, in the charged spectacle of drag and performance art, and the allure of B**M clubs. Through the pulse of electronic music and the blur of movement, she stitched pieces of herself back together. For the first time, she felt agency in her own body: to move, to be seen, to take up space without apology. That rhythm, that spectacle, that audacity, it seeped into her work and stayed there. Another turning point came when she read Silvia Federici’s Witch-Hunting, Past and Present, and the Fear of the Power of Women. It wasn’t just a paper; it was a key. Federici linked the fences built to carve up land and the fences drawn around women’s bodies… showing how control over reproduction, labor, and autonomy was never accidental. For Honey, that was the click of a lock opening. The fear of powerful women wasn’t paranoia. It was history. And suddenly, she had language for what she’d always felt. Her process is equal parts play and precision. Every element of her original collages comes from physical print… no digital editing, no AI-generated imagery. She cuts by hand, sometimes with a surgical scalpel, sometimes with tiny ocular scissors sharp enough to feel dangerous against paper… tools that allow for the precision of dissection. Some cuts are clean, contour-perfect; others are left raw, ripped, fleshy. When she assembles, she layers and weaves, sometimes leaving edges loose so that shadows breathe between them. Every cut, every gap, every lift is intentional. These aren’t mash-ups. They’re built, piece by piece, until the story lands. Her influences stretch from Dalí to pop surrealism, midcentury advertising to psychedelia, meditation to mysticism. Her spiritual practice… working with earth energy, moon cycles, and cosmic whispers, shapes the way she works: creation as ritual, alignment, invocation. Some motifs are hers alone. Illusion paper is her command to “look here”, as something is not as it should be. It serves also as a representation of her own cognitive dissonance, the friction between surface and truth. Tentacles are her psyche and agency, made visible: sometimes tender, sometimes destructive, sometimes dragging secrets into the light. They aren’t tricks; they’re her private language, grown visible over time. Her collages live in the tension between nostalgia and rupture. The familiar pulls you in; the fracture makes you stay. Death and rebirth, alchemy, sexuality, control, chaos… not abstract concepts, but lived realities. She’s not here to comfort you. Unless she’s saying, “Everything is fine,” with that look that tells you it isn’t.
