Hannah “Honey” Jaeger builds collages the way some people tell secrets… slowly, deliberately, with just enough left to the imagination to draw you closer. Born in California in 1993, she obtained her BFA from ArtCenter College of Design in 2020. She currently works out of her Los Angeles home studio, surrounded by stacks of Playboy, Life, and National Geographic magazines; art, architecture, and picture books covering topics from clowns to cathedrals, landscapes to science; and a host of thrifted printed media. Every image she intentionally harvests from these sources is alchemized into a new narrative. As a kinetic learner and visual thinker, she’s not simply arranging pictures on a page.

She grew up in a conservative religious household, where she experienced firsthand the shame, blame, and burden of “pureness” imposed on her female identity. The loss of her mother at age 11 sparked an urgent need to create… to process grief and work through a deeply turbulent emotional state. Art became the means by which she could communicate what words could not. Today, through collage, the arrangement of carefully harvested images allows Jaeger to explore her phenomenological experiences of current culture and events, as well as reflect on and dismantle past socioeconomic systems of power, structures, belief systems, and media that shape modern ideologies. Her work doesn’t dodge the hard parts, it delivers them cheekily, like a visual sucker punch wrapped in lace.

Honey: The Art of Reclamation and Transformation

At ArtCenter, honey’s world cracked wide open. She found inspiration in the freedom of after-hours nightclubs, from electronic music to BDSM clubs. Through dance, pain, and the seductive trance of a disco ball, she began healing a part of herself that had been disembodied. For the first time, she felt comfortable and empowered in her own skin… to step into that kind of space, to move, to be seen, to have agency. That energy, the rhythm, the spectacle, the refusal to apologize all worked its way into her visual vocabulary and never left.

A turning point at ArtCenter came after she read Silvia Federici’s Witch-Hunting, Past and Present, and the Fear of the Power of Women. It was more than an academic paper, it was a permission slip to unlock a voice oppressed long ago. Federici drew the line between the literal fencing off of land during the creation of enclosures and the metaphorical fencing in of women’s bodies and agency. Control over reproduction, labor, and autonomy was never accidental. For honey, it was the click of a lock opening. The world’s fear of powerful women wasn’t paranoia, it was history.

Her process involves a lot of play, almost like dressing a paper doll. Every element comes from physical print sources… no digital editing, no AI-generated imagery. She cuts by hand, often with a surgical scalpel or ocular surgical scissors, tools that allow for the precision of dissection. Some cuts follow every contour; others leave the edge raw and ripped, letting the fleshy paper carry part of the message. During assembly, she carefully plays with composition, weaving and layering her collages to create a narrative. Every choice, every cut, every layer is intentional.

Her influences range from Salvador Dalí to pop surrealism, midcentury messaging, spirituality, psychedelia, and meditation. Her practice as a natural witch, working with earth energy, moon cycles, and cosmic whispers, shapes the way she builds each piece, creating with intention as both ritual and alignment.

Certain motifs are hers alone. Illusion paper acts as a visual “look here,” but also emphasizes the friction between what’s shown and what’s true. Tentacles are honey’s way of symbolically placing her psyche in the work… sometimes holding, sometimes dismantling, sometimes exposing, sometimes dragging the truth into the light. They’re not tricks; they’re a private vocabulary that’s grown visible over time.

Her work lives in the tension between nostalgia and rupture. The familiar lures you in; the fracture makes you stay. Death and rebirth, alchemy, sexuality, control and chaos… not abstract ideas, but lived realities. She’s not here to reassure you… Unless she’s saying, “Everything is fine,” with that look that tells you it isn’t.