Kate FitzSimons Collage

My personal philosophy is all about balance. In my opinion, the happiest you can be in when you have almost, if not all, complete balance in your life. By balance I mean the things that are necessities and luxuries, work and play, pain and pleasure. In a very basic sense, it comes down to the self and the community. Without balance of the two you get chaos, an internal civil war, fighting your mental well-being. To have an extreme of one, luxuries for example, would bring out (in my opinion) the worst side of people- the spoiled brat, the heartless billionaire, the greedy tycoon.
To have an extreme of the other, work for instance, would bring out not the worst, but yet the dejected, pathetic almost, side of people. Their entire lives are centered around the necessities, the workplace, the pain without the pleasure. They do nothing to enjoy themselves and become almost automatons- the human slowly becoming the work itself.


My collage incorporates this philosophy in its most literal sense- the main object and majority of the background is a scale (also seen as the scale of justice).
My philosophy is subjective to the person it applies to, so the images I chose are personal to what I consider the “necessities” and the “luxuries” and how it applies to my life and self. On the self/luxury/play side of the scale, I included images of travel, superficial pleasures, and the individual self. On the community/necessity/work side, I included images of literal work, the importance of family, school, and supporting communities such as homosexuals, mentally disabled, and the elderly.
As with most things, there is some difficulty choosing which side a single thing can go on. Money, for instance, was difficult- so I chose to show two different sides of money: the earning of it (on the necessity side) is pictured as a physical bag of money and the spending of it (on the luxury side) is a literal American Express card.