The Cultural Tourist

For the last umpteen months I have been collaging and transferring my photographs onto found materials. I suspect I will continue with this aspect of my work if and when I come across suitable and interesting materials to work upon. Then one day as I was clearing out my studio I came across scraps of paper and sketch books with bits of my doodles, sketches and collages which in themselves didn’t really amount to much, other than they were subconscious outpourings from a few years ago These artistic detritus I realised were also a type of ‘found’ material which I could further explore and work upon. Copiously photographing these items I set to work using Photoshop, cropping and digitally manipulating these to my heart’s content. I feel so pleased with the results I feel like I have cracked open Aladdin’s cave in terms of the liberation and potential this gives me going forward. To an outsider this may seem rather an exaggeration, but this new venture not only remains true to my practice (be it in a reverse kind of way), but it also excites me in the perpetual iteration of the work – it both turns in on itself, but also leads to a kind of divergence.