No two fingerprints are exactly alike. The ridges and whorls on your fingertips formed before you were born and they belong to you alone. Experience works the same way. Two people can sit in the same room, hear the same news or live with the same diagnosis and each carries it differently. That idea stayed with me for a long time before I found the right place to use it.
I'm Sarah Ellen Masters and I run Collé, collage workshops in London for people, teams and organisations who want to explore, reconnect and build creative confidence through accessible making. Collage means building a picture from cut and torn pieces: paper, photographs, fabric, found materials. You don't need to draw or call yourself creative. You choose, arrange and stick and the picture builds from there.
My postgraduate research looked at mixed media collage and emotional connection. What it showed me is that materials can hold feelings and identity in a way words often can't. A colour you reach for, a texture you keep returning to, a scrap you can't explain choosing: these say something and nobody has to put it into a sentence. A fingerprint gave that idea a shape anyone could hold.
The place to use it came from Great Ormond Street Hospital. Its immunology team cares for children and young people whose immune systems, the body's defence against infection, don't work as they should. Camilla, a trainee Advanced Nurse Practitioner, and Lily, a psychologist, both in that team, co-led the hospital’s first Teenage Immunology Day, a Saturday gathering for young people aged 15 to 20, and asked me to design a creative session for it.
The brief was open. They wanted time that genuinely belonged to the group, with no pressure and no agenda beyond making something together. The fingerprint idea fit.
I didn't know the group beforehand. I didn't know who would want to talk, who wouldn't, or who would rather sit and work with their hands for two hours and leave it at that. Whatever I designed had to work whichever way the room went.
The method I built around it was simple. Make a page first, any way you like, using paper, colour, images, pattern, whatever you're drawn to. Then lay a fingerprint stencil, a cut-out shape of a fingerprint, over the top, so only parts of the page show through its ridges, like looking through a window with bars.
Every stencil was cut in advance, off-site, so nobody in the room needed to think about tools or scissors near the fingerprint shape itself. A set of prompt cards sat on the tables too, each with a gentle question on it, things like what's made you smile this week, there for anyone who wanted a starting point. Nobody had to use them.
On the day, I opened by showing my own piece and asked the group if anyone could guess why I'd chosen a parrot. A few guesses came back before I explained: parrots are known for being different and I felt drawn to that. It set the tone before anyone had picked anything up, there's no wrong answer.
Camilla and the GOSH team made pieces alongside everyone else, which changed the whole feel of the tables. This wasn't staff supervising participants, it was simply people making things together.
By the end of the afternoon, the tables were covered in collages, every one different. It was a true delight and energy shift.
“
Sarah joined our first ever GOSH Immunology Teenage Day and helped to facilitate a workshop centred around the theme of identity. The young people and staff got stuck in and we thoroughly enjoyed connecting through collage and creativity. There was great feedback from the people who joined on the day and we would absolutely use Collé again. Thanks so much Sarah for such an enjoyable experience that helped to bring everyone together on the day :)”
Bring this uplifting energy to your own group
Tell me the date and roughly how many people are coming, then book an exploration call with me, or email hello@colle.uk.
If you're looking for collage workshops or experiential creativity in London and beyond for a hospital, school, charity, team day or community gathering, I'd love to bring Collé to you. Let's find out what it could hold for your group.