Kaleidoscope

This is a mixed media collage on canvas. The face is one of the leftovers after I had used the eyes out of it for another collage last year. I have becoming more and more obsessed with the images left behind after I have used pieces of them for collage.
I have used metallic oil bars and roughly dragged over the canvas so it shows the texture of the canvas. Also I used a texture gel with a gold metallic acrylic paint to go round the edge of the canvas to create a frame effect, like gilt effect on old frames. This is not visible in this photograph. There is also a streak of metallic nail varnish to add to the types of media I had used on this image.
I liked this particular left over image because of the scarf round her neck made her almost look like she was being strangled now that her eyes and mouth were missing.
I used the dried acrylic paint that I left on the paper from my stay wet pallette to attach to the space where the eyes and mouth had been. The texture of this gave an interesting effect, making it appear that it was oozing from the space where her eyes and mouth should have been.
This made me think of everything I thought about the fashion world and this substance oozing from her missing features being the nonsense and lies spoken by and seen by those included in the media.

Before I gave the dolls house a thorough clean, I thought I’d take a few photographs of the inside, while it looked like a miniature derelict house. It was a bit of an experiment with scale, to see what tricks the camera could play on the eye.

Leaving intact all the spiderwebs and decaying wallpaper and putting the dolls house in my garden so all that could be seen through the glass, I found the results of the photographs quite realistic and without anything of real size in the image to go by, it could easily be a life size building.

Having the grass in the background helped with the illusion of size and made the images remind me of an abandoned house in the woods I used to play in as a child. Also bringing back the slightly scared feeling of being alone in that house in the middle of the woods, the way that buildings like that are associated with creepiness from Halloween stories and dares, to scenes from horror films like Blair Witch Project.

I’m pleased with the effectiveness of these images and once I have cleaned and collaged the whole house, I will take some more photographs to play with the scale then as well.

After deciding I would never be able to collage my actual home I began thinking about making a mini environment. My first ideas were to create it in a shoe box or making an enclosed environment, but then I was very luckily offered an old dolls house by a friend.
These are the photographs of the house on the day that I got it, it’s quite an imposing house, run down and dark in colour giving it a slightly macabre feel to it. This was perfect for me as I love the creepy feel to it and old fashioned look, the wood inside has deteriorated a bit and the windows are grubby and cracked. I won’t be making a Merz house or a 3d collage, just collaging a found object, making a house of images.

Schwitters was a German artist linked to Cubism, German Expressionism and for a small time, Dadaism. Creating work for most of the first half of the 20th century up until his death in 1948, I found Schwitters collages interesting and influential.
Although his source material is totally different to mine, in a way it wasn’t it just used the equivalent materials from his lifetime, newspaper cuttings, materials available to him and as below, pieces from games.

I love Schwitters nonsensicalness, he wrote Dada poetry, one of which is just two minutes of him pretty much making funny noises. Although being serious in his world, is also ridiculous. His work was attacking the bourgeoisie and philistinism by not being obsessed with aesthetics and creating his collages with any conceivable material that he considered equal to paint.

Schwitters invented Merz A type of 3D collage which he used any material from paper to found objects. He really concentrated on this after being rejected from Berlin’s Dada scene.

As well as creating collages, he also made several building interiors into living collages, the best known was the Merzbau in Hanover. A five/ six bedroom family home that took Schwitters over ten years to complete the first room then he started to spread to other areas of the house. He carried on working on the house until he fled Germany in 1937. The final amount of the house covered was two of his parents rooms on the ground floor, the adjoining balcony, space below the balcony, one or two rooms of the attic and the cellar. Unfortunately it was destroyed in an air raid in 1943.

I love this house and the idea of being fully immersed in your own work, inside a collage. These pictures make me think of something out of a Tim Burton film or a Neil Gaiman book and is almost like being inside a fantasy world. I would love to be able to create something similar to this, but unfortunately I do not have the time, resources or property to do it!

After fleeing Germany to Norway, Schwitters eventually ended up in England and becoming a huge influence on many artistic household names, Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and more recently Damien Hurst. He stated that the war had taught him ‘Things were in terrible turmoil….everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz.’
In 1945 he moved to the Lake District and created his last great sculpture and installation – the Merzbarn. It was a continuation of the Hanover Merzbau that carried on until his death.

These are three sections of a fantasy collage I have made. The background is a found item of already painted board that I came across in the woodwork rooms. The brightly coloured swirls of what I think is printing ink reminded me of my own work and the backgrounds I had created with oil paints on board with one of my collages from last year.

I found these images mostly in Vogue And Harper’s Bazaar From full blown fashion shoots and from adverts. The original imagery was polished and perfected, I have changed it to be a bit choppy and almost like animation so the images are far from their original context.

I prefer this work in sections rather than as a whole piece and I am considering cutting up the board or reproducing sections of it either as photographs or as images printed onto canvas.