Bridging the Distance
Postcard Collage, Social Connection & Chronic Illness
A postcard is a boundary with an address on it.
One side is the art. The other side is the message. The edge of the card is where your creative practice meets the distance between you and someone else — and decides to do something about it.
With chronic illness, that distance can accumulate without anyone meaning for it to. You cancel enough plans, miss enough gatherings, spend enough time managing your body instead of your relationships, and the gap between you and the people you care about starts to have its own shape. This practice is about making something in that space.
We’re using the postcard format — small, complete, sendable — to work with positive and negative shapes on a scale that is manageable and a little bit fun. And we’re going to let the negative space lead for once.
ENERGY RATING: 4
Shapes & Social Connection
This is Part 3 of the Shape series. In the first practice, we made a shape journal and a simple collage to look at the boundaries in our lives—the ones we hold, the ones placed on us, and the secondary shapes that form in the space between two boundaries. In the second practice, we pushed some of those boundaries by layering cut shapes over a familiar collaged background. This practice builds directly on both, so it’s worth reading or watching the first two practices.
Watch on YouTube
Using Shapes to Explore Boundaries in Chronic Illness
A quick note on shape and space
A shape is a two-dimensional area defined by its edge—a boundary. Space is everything around, between, and within shapes. Positive space is the shape itself; negative space is what surrounds it. In this practice, we’re going a step further: we’re using the paper left over after cutting a shape as a shape in its own right. The negative space becomes positive. The leftover becomes the point.
We introduced composition in the second practice—the intentional arrangement of visual elements in space—and you’ll keep using that instinct here. If something feels off, move it. Follow your intuition.
But this isn’t just about visual language.
Loneliness and isolation are some of the most common—and least talked about—parts of living with chronic illness. Many people assume they’re the only ones feeling this way, when in reality it’s something most of us experience at some point. Recent work from researchers in the arts and health field, like Project UnLonely, Your Brain on Art, and The Art Cure all point to the same thing: making art, even in a virtual community, can help rebuild social connection. Not by fixing everything all at once, but by creating moments of expression, recognition, and sharing. This practice sits right in that space.
We’ve been talking about boundaries in the first two practices—but boundaries don’t just define us. They also create space.
And sometimes, that space fills with things we didn’t choose: distance, silence, missed time with people we care about.
In this practice, we’re going to work directly with that space—not as something to fix, but as something to notice, shape, and maybe gently begin to bridge.
SUPPLIES
For the check-In
Pencil
Marker or crayon
Shape journal from the first practice, or a fresh piece of copy paper
For the creative practice
2-3 index cards 4x6 size
Colored paper: solid colored paper like construction paper or colored copy paper. You can also use any emotional paintings that you may have done, old drawings, the inside of security envelopes, magazine pages that are mostly color.
Scissors or exacto knife
Glue or glue stick
Clear packing tape and some postage stamps
If you need supplies, please consider purchasing from my affiliate links. I may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases (at no cost to you).
Blick Art Supplies
Collage: visit the list
THE PRACTICE
Watch on YouTube: Bridging the Distance
Check-in: Shape journal
Open your shape journal to a blank box — or draw one on copy paper.
Draw the shape of your current social network, or the gap between you and someone you haven’t been in contact with for a while. Not a diagram, just the shape of it.
I drew something that looks like a cell dividing and stretching.
Create
In this practice, we’re not just working with shapes—we’re working with absence.
The negative space you’ve been saving—the paper left behind after cutting—is the shape of what isn’t there anymore. And for a lot of us, that space doesn’t just exist on the page. It shows up in our relationships too.
People we haven’t seen. Conversations that stopped. Connections that shifted without us meaning for them to.
Today, we’re going to make something from that space.
Step 1: Pull from what you already have
Go back to the shapes you’ve already cut in the first two practices — the leftovers, the offcuts, the pieces still sitting on your table. If you’ve been keeping them, this is their moment. If not, cut a few new shapes from your colored paper and save the negative shape.
The instruction for this practice is simple and worth sitting with: cut shapes in order to use what’s left.
When you cut a shape out of a piece of paper, you have two things. The shape itself — positive space, declared edge, the thing you meant to make. And the paper it came from — negative space, the outline of an absence, the shape of what’s no longer there. Both go on the card.
Notice which one you’re drawn to—the defined shape, or the one that holds the outline of what’s missing.
Sometimes absence has a different weight to it.
Step 2: Work on your index cards
Take one of your index cards and begin auditioning shapes — positive and negative — onto the surface. Work without gluing at first. Use your intuition to move the shapes around and see what you like.
A few things to try:
Pair a cut shape with the paper it came from. Place them near each other or overlapping. Notice the echo — the same edge, read twice, in two different registers. That pairing creates rhythm.
There’s something happening at that edge—the same boundary, holding both presence and absence.
It can feel a little like holding a connection that’s still there… and not there at the same time.
Let shapes overlap each other to create foreground, middleground, and background. Something comes forward, something recedes. Depth appears in the relationship.
Use the remaining paper — the piece left after multiple cuts — as its own compositional element. By the time you’ve cut several shapes from one piece of paper, what remains is a record of every decision you made. It has its own complex edge.
You can work on one card at a time, or work across two or three cards simultaneously. Shapes that don’t work on one card often find a home on another.
Repeating a shape creates rhythm.
It’s not unlike reaching out more than once—connection rarely happens in a single moment. It builds, or it fades, over time.
As you work, notice where shapes feel connected… and where they don’t.
That tension—the space between—is part of the composition too.
Step 3: Compose and commit
When a card makes you happy or feels resolved — or at least interesting — glue everything down.
Step 4: Finish for mailing (optional)
If you’re sending these, cover the front with a strip or two of clear packing tape, overlapping the strips slightly to cover the surface and wrapping them to the back of the card. Smooth out any bubbles. This stabilizes the collage and protects it in transit. A standard 4x6 postcard stamp is all you need. The post office will handle the rest.
Reflection
Before you analyze anything, just look at what you made.
What do you notice about the negative shapes — the ones that appeared from absence rather than intention? Do they feel different than the shapes you cut on purpose?
When you paired a positive shape with the paper it came from, what happened at the edge between them? Did they feel like one shape, or like two separate things?
The distance between people has a shape too. What does yours look like right now — and what would you want it to look like if it could shift?
Conversation
I’ve been doing the Index Card a Day challenge — ICAD — with Tammy at Daisy Yellow for a couple of years now. I can never finish all the days. That’s a boundary I’ve made peace with. The prompts are interesting, the format keeps me playful, and I end up with a stack of small pieces that are exactly postcard size.
I’m also part of a handmade postcard club. We send each other postcards with original art — real mail, handwritten, made by hand. Some of the people in my club I see regularly. Others I haven’t been in the same room with in years. Chronic illness has a way of making distance the default, even with people you didn’t mean to lose touch with. The postcards are one way I push back on that.
Sometimes it’s not even a clean break.
It’s just… time passing. Plans canceled. Energy rerouted. Conversations that get a little farther apart each time until the space between you holds more than the relationship does.
That’s the part I keep thinking about in this practice—the way absence accumulates. Quietly. Without announcement.
And how making something, even something small, can interrupt that.
This practice was easier than the first two. Making postcards is familiar. The small format lowers the stakes — whatever happens on a 4x6 card is contained, complete, and going to someone who will appreciate it regardless. That made it easier to play, and playing made it easier to push.
What I pushed was the negative space. I started using the paper left over after cutting shapes — not as scrap, but as the shape. When you pair a cut shape with the paper it came from and place them together, you get an echo. The same edge, present twice. It adds rhythm in a way that a single shape on a ground doesn’t.
I’ve also come to appreciate what the clearly defined edge does that I’ve spent most of my practice trying to avoid. My work usually tries to blur foreground and background, to keep things ambiguous, to resist the declared edge. These cards don’t do any of that. They’re clean. Simplified. Easily read. And there’s something that works about that — a composition that doesn’t ask the viewer to do much work, that just sits there and holds its shape.
Now look at the three practices as a whole.
In the first practice, the secondary shapes — the zones that formed in the white space between cut shapes — appeared without being planned. I noticed them after the fact and couldn’t stop looking at them.
In the second practice, I started working with them deliberately — placing shapes to create specific relationships, watching where boundaries blurred and where they held.
In this practice, the negative space is no longer what’s left over. It’s where I’m starting. The leftover paper, the outline of an absence, the shape of what’s no longer there — that’s the material.
That arc matters for chronic illness. So much of what we navigate is already bounded — by diagnosis, by capacity, by the distance that accumulates when your body makes showing up unreliable. But there’s something else in the negative space that I keep coming back to. The paper left after cutting isn’t just absence. It’s not empty. It’s specific. It holds the exact contour of what was there.
And maybe that’s why it feels familiar because the relationships we’ve drifted from don’t disappear. They leave a shape behind. It still has edges and you can fill it.
Check out
Look at the shape you drew during the check-in.
Then choose one person. Someone who’s a little farther away than you’d like. And decide which postcard they should get.
You can write whatever you like on the back. I like to write a 4x4 poem on the back of mine. Four lines with four to six words each. In the first line, I usually describe something I can see in the distance. For the second line, I describe something close by me, maybe something I can touch. For the last two lines, I describe the last time we were together or a memory that we share.
You don’t have to mail this. Keeping it is still a complete practice.
But if you do send it, notice what shifts—because sometimes closing distance starts with something this small.
Until Next Time
In the next creative practice, we’ll keep building our visual language—this time by exploring form, working with three dimensions.
Until then, if this idea of distance—and trying to stay connected in the middle of it—feels familiar, I’d love to invite you into my Wayfinding community.
It’s a therapeutic arts space for women living with chronic illness, where we’re not just making things—we’re finding ways to stay connected to ourselves and each other, even when life reshapes what that looks like.
Inside Wayfinding, we gather for monthly open studios, workshops, and shared moments of making alongside people who understand what it means when showing up isn’t always possible—but connection still matters.
You’ll also get practices like this in your inbox, along with my Life Lessons essays and members-only practices that go a little deeper.
Join us if you’re looking for a way to create social connection with women who understand.
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Because healing isn’t linear — and neither is art.