Collage is an inclusive, accessible medium, a creative way of rearranging reality. There are no rules, and the materials are cheap and easily available. This is Lubaina Himid's life-size cutout We Will Be (1983, Walker Art Gallery) which is made with wool, silver paper, photographs and text which, as she says, "states that we will be who we want to be, when we want to be". (Looking back in 2010, she also said that it "now seems astonishingly bold somehow.")

Tirzah Garwood's collages are not as surreal as Hannah Höch's or Dora Maar's, although it would be a mistake to see them simply as domestic pastimes. Her collaged shop and house "portraits", as curator James Russell calls them, which often incorporated her leaf prints, reveal immense skill and precision, as evidenced by House at Night (1945, private collection). (This short article includes a small image of the article she wrote about making a collage picture.)

Hannah Höch (1889-1978) was the only female artist associated with the anti-establishment Dada group in Weimar Germany and one of the originators of  photomontage; her collages are often surreal, subversive, and unsettling. She often incorporated dress and embroidery patterns which she obtained through her work as a designer in the handicrafts department of publisher Ullstein Verlag, as in Untitled (1921). Her work is in major collections and features in the MoMA Woven Histories exhibition.

This week's subject is collage, and specifically collage art created by women. The category is usually dominated by names such as Picasso, Braque, Gris, Dali, Duchamp, and Piper, but female artists have been putting together often surreal and juxtapositions of images since collage and découpage became polite parlour pastimes in the C19. As this article says, for Victorian women photocollage could be a means to subvert social norms and even flirt, which is what Lady Filmer (1840-1903) is doing here with the Prince of Wales in Lady Filmer in her drawing room (1860s, Chicago).

Bricks and Mortar (1932) is about the working and domestic life of a London architect from the 1890s to the early 1930s, and is fascinating for its commentary on changing tastes in architecture during this period. Martin would prefer to spend his precious holidays in places like Bruges and Rome, and cannot reconcile himself to his first family break in Worthing with the band, the crowds, the pier, and the bright little turreted rented villa. Holidays in Bournemouth, Littlestone, Broadstairs ,and finally fashionable Felixstowe and its now Grade II listed with its ornamental gardens follow before Martin protests at his critical mother-in-law's plans for his family's holidays and escapes to Europe, first on his own and later with his daughter.

Saplings (1945) opens in the summer of 1939 in Eastbourne where the Wiltshire family is on holiday, the children playing on the beach in front of the grand hotels which line the front. This is the Cavendish Hotel on the Grand Parade (1870s) as it was before WWII bomb damage to one side which was then rebuilt in a different style (it is still there). In a way, it reflects the theme of novel which considers 'the disintegration and devastation which war brought to tens of thousands of families' like the Wiltshires. Eastbourne is also, of course, where Tirzah Garwood grew up and later met Eric Ravilious.