The Scrapbook Fights Back: How Junk Journals Are Becoming a New Art Movement

Art movements do not always begin in galleries. Sometimes, they begin on the bedroom floor, surrounded by torn magazine pages, half-used stickers, train tickets, and a glue stick that has seen better days. In a cultural moment where creativity often comes pre-packaged and productivity is equated with perfection, junk journaling is quietly, and defiantly, flipping the script. Part memory-keeping, part rebellion, this tactile practice is now carving a space for itself in the larger art world, championing imperfection, emotion, and the deeply personal. From school desks to zine festivals to community workshops, junk journals are emerging as one of the most emotionally honest and politically potent art forms of our time.

What Is Junk Journal Art? Origins, Influence, and the Making of a Movement

A junk journal is a handmade book crafted from discarded, found, or repurposed materials, anything from food wrappers to fabric scraps to ticket stubs. But beyond being a physical object, it represents a form of storytelling where texture, mess, and memory take centre stage. Unlike traditional journals, junk journals do not follow linear timelines or neat paragraphs. They are chaotic, layered, and richly intimate. The origins of junk journaling can be traced back to scrapbooking practices of the 15th and 16th centuries, where common folk and aristocrats alike documented their lives using cuttings, mementoes, and handwritten reflections. In the 1800s, Victorian “commonplace books” and friendship albums gained popularity, evolving into more decorative scrapbooks by the early 20th century. However, it wasn’t until the early 2000s that the term “junk journaling” gained momentum online, particularly in craft forums, YouTube tutorials, and Etsy communities, as a reaction to the polished aesthetics of modern memory-keeping.

Today, junk journaling has become more than a craft; it is a philosophy. It challenges mainstream, hyper-commercialised art forms and celebrates reuse and emotional authenticity. According to Etsy’s 2023 trend report, searches for “junk journal kit” rose by 86% year-on-year, and on TikTok, the hashtag #junkjournal has racked up over 900 million views as of early 2024. While often dismissed as hobbyist work, many practitioners argue that junk journaling is a legitimate form of contemporary mixed-media art that blends autobiography, design, and protest.

The Indian Scene: Jugaad, Emotion, and Everyday Resistance

In India, junk journaling is not just a craft; it is a deeply personal, improvised response to both material scarcity and emotional overload. While its Western counterparts may lean toward curated kits and hobby aesthetics, the Indian version thrives on repurposing the everyday. It finds beauty in the unassuming: old ration books, festival flyers, wedding invites, broken bangles, school notebooks, medicine strips. Rooted in a culture of jugaad, junk journaling here is not only about reuse but about reclaiming authorship in a world where most expression is still gatekept by access, language, or class. It cuts across urban and rural divides and becomes a form of visual storytelling that can belong to anyone with glue, memory, and something to say. This is especially visible in schools and homes where resources are limited, yet creativity flourishes.

Kavita, a teacher in rural Maharashtra, noted, “I’ve seen kids from less privileged backgrounds do a better job at this. They use scrap and leftover paper, it exemplifies reduce, reuse, recycle.” One respondent, a design student in Pune, Jyoti, recounted her introduction to the medium after a school fight: “I used a lot of crayons and stationery to describe how much I hated them. It felt like revenge therapy.” There is something uniquely cathartic in this freedom, where emotions are not hidden beneath structure but splattered, layered, and taped across a page. This form of art-making is especially meaningful in a country where perfection is prized, whether in academia, jobs, or social identity. Junk journaling offers a kind of refusal: a refusal to be tidy, to be productive, or to present oneself in a palatable way. In that, it carries subtle resistance. As Aarav, a student in Mumbai, put it, “In a world full of people in the rat race, junk journaling allows for more freedom and satisfaction.” This freedom is not about aesthetic beauty; it is about emotional survival. Artists use scraps as stand-ins for things that cannot be said aloud. 

What Goes Into a Junk Journal: A Beginner’s Guide to Beautiful Chaos

There are no hard rules when it comes to junk journaling, only possibilities. Anything that carries a story, a memory, a moment of significance (or even insignificance), can find its place between the pages. Scraps of fabric from a worn-out kurta, cinema ticket stubs, packaging from a beloved snack, leaves picked up on a walk, old stamps, train passes, mehendi patterns on tissue, even expired ID cards, each item becomes a tiny relic of a lived life. Unlike traditional scrapbooking, which often focuses on neatly decorated memories and visual symmetry, junk journaling thrives on disorder and imperfection. That is precisely what makes it accessible to beginners; it does not require expensive materials or aesthetic mastery, just an emotional connection to the bits and pieces you choose to save.

For those starting, the best approach is to begin with what you already have. Start by collecting items you would normally throw away but find oddly hard to part with, labels, thank-you notes, gift wrap, dried flowers, and old receipts. You do not need a fancy notebook to begin; even a used school notebook or torn diary will do. A glue stick, scissors, some pens, and tape are enough to get going. Create pockets in your pages, fold paper scraps into envelopes, layer magazine cuttings with bits of handwriting. There’s beauty in overlapping, tearing, and taping things down without thinking too hard. You can even write or doodle over already printed material. The point is not to preserve perfection, but to capture a fragment of the present before it disappears. Some artists like to add journal prompts to guide the process, “What does silence look like?” or “Who did I want to be at 15?”, but others simply let the materials lead the way. Whether you use your junk journal as a dreamscape, an emotional purge, a creative sketchbook, or a quiet archive, what matters is that it feels like yours. As many seasoned junk journalists will tell you, the magic isn’t in how it looks, it’s in how it makes you feel when you close the book.

Conclusion: From Scrap to Statement

While junk journals may have begun in bedrooms and school desks, their growing resonance raises a timely question: do they deserve space in galleries and art institutions? For many practitioners, the answer is yes, but with caution. Meher, the Delhi-based artist, articulated this tension well when she said, “Galleries can show them, but I’d rather see them in libraries or community centres than behind glass.” The very spirit of junk journaling lies in its accessibility, its resistance to polish, and its closeness to everyday life. It is art that belongs on kitchen tables, in classrooms, on pavements, not necessarily in climate-controlled rooms behind velvet ropes. Yet, its impact cannot be denied. These journals are layered artefacts of emotion, memory, and protest, and their rawness challenges the gatekeeping of what qualifies as ‘art’ in the first place.

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Looking ahead, the movement is poised to grow in unexpected directions. With platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Etsy making room for unfiltered storytelling, junk journaling is carving out its corner of the creative economy. As one artist noted, “It’ll go beyond the restraints of traditional art institutes. Like NFTs, it’ll allow more artistic flexibility.” From scanned spreads sold as zines to digital junk journals preserved as emotional archives, the future of this art form may be hybrid, blending paper and pixels, offline mess and online community. But no matter where it goes, junk journaling will continue to speak to a deep human instinct: to hold onto fragments of the world, rearrange them, and make meaning out of the mess.