Many try to slip through the big nets—ducking, dodging, pretending to be perfectly presentable and painfully normal—while the people in white coats politely insist you take a ride in the back of a van labeled “Booby Hatch.” It’s never subtle. The clipboard appears. The pen clicks with bureaucratic bravado. Someone whispers the words “craft time” like it’s either a threat… or a promise… or possibly both wrapped in glitter.

And suddenly you’re in a bright room buzzing with fluorescent forgiveness, armed with safety scissors, Elmer’s glue, and a suspicious abundance of magazines, paint, yarn, crayons, and markers. Stacks and stacks of supplies. Towers of temptation. The question is obvious: what to do with all this stuff?

What sane person buys books—beautiful, bound, perfectly innocent books—only to tear them up with theatrical enthusiasm? What rational adult rips pages from their spines, rescues paragraphs mid-sentence, and sentences them to canvas? What kind of creative criminal lets paint spill, splatter, seep, and spread… and somehow never quite cleans it up? (Answer: the productive kind.)

Welcome to the Booby Hatch—a place where awkward bits of paper that wandered too far from their books find themselves on canvas. Misfit margins. Runaway headlines. Wayward woodcuts. Rip. Tear. Glue. Glue again. Yarn tangles where it wants, weaving whimsical webs with zero supervision. Marker lines march across paint with militant mischief. Crayons insist on being heard in waxy, willful rebellion, and nothing—absolutely nothing—is inside the lines.

But what came from these craft time shenanigans, from this sanctioned scissors-and-splatter spectacle, was a brilliantly fun and beautifully insane body of work of over 75 mixed media collages on canvas, shown at the Springbox Gallery in Portland, Oregon in the Autumn of 2011.

Seventy-five sticky, splattered, gloriously unhinged testaments to the idea that sometimes the mess is the method—and madness, when managed with markers, can be magnificent.