Christmas Collage Kit - Cut Up This Book by Maria Rivans

The most creative Christmas ever! Collage your own spectacular cards and decorations with this festive collection of surprising images.

You'll find whatever makes your celebrations complete. From Santa Claus, bells, baubles and reindeer to snowflakes, mistletoe and roaring log fires, it's the ultimate Christmas crafting kit. Also includes backgrounds, templates and step-by-step projects.

Extent: 104 pp
Format: Paperback
Illustrations: Illustrated in colour
Publication date: 2025-10-14
Size: 31.0 x 23.7 cm

About Maria Rivans

Maria Rivans is a contemporary British artist, known for her scrapbook-style collage aesthetic. A mash-up of Surrealism meets Pop-Art, Rivans’s work re-appropriates vintage ephemera to create dreamy realms, which transport the viewer into fantastical worlds of the imaginary, each one suffused with vivid colour, arresting imagery, intricate detail, and finished with a dusting of subtle humour. 

Rivans’ artwork is known for its unique approach to collaging. Intertwining different film and TV genres - from vintage Hollywood, to 1970s sci-fi, B-movies and TV trash - Rivans’ work is in a constant dialogue with cultures of the past, reinventing existing film plots and narratives, while spinning bizarre and dreamlike tales. Her use of collage reflects the complex and fragmented world from which the art arises, but an attention to beauty and to harmony of composition gestures optimistically towards the social capacity to piece it back together again. In her pin-up series, Rivans reclaims iconic femininity to champion female strength; her exotic and escapist works are often laced with ominous undertones, to remind us of the darker side of human nature; utopian imagery from 1950s pop-culture speaks to today’s obsession with consumerism; while a persistent love of sci-fi illustrates the fact that Rivans’ work is always a meditation on the greater question of ‘life, the universe, and everything’. 

Rivans’ process begins with her extensive collection of vintage ephemera, which she scavenges from found books and retro magazines, always on the look-out for that perfect ‘something’ in second-hand shops and at market stalls and more recently using internet archives opening up a plethora of beautiful source material from the 1800’s.