Making new work is never easy. Fight the desire to abandon it as a failure. Instead, empty my mind of fixed expectations and play freely with form and materials. Hold my nerve. Persist until something happens. Pin the results on the wall, contemplate, re-arrange and edit until only the strong survive.
Lessons: There has to be a connection between the two pictures in each collage – objects or form. Interactions vary; a few are linear and some overlap at one corner. Paper folds work best if they’re assertive and few in numbers and when they echo architecture in the images. Practically, these interventions can’t be spaced too far apart or the paper collapses.
The scale is modest scale – intimate for careful looking but sufficient to reveal details. The final collages are objects not pictures so feel wrong paper mounted and framed. The only suitable support appears to be glass.
More about my work: my website – twitter feed
My other blog: inspiration
Still shots from ‘In search of the unreal n.01’
Fold, bend, cut
Draw a line
Overlay, conceal, reveal, interrupt, disrupt
The shifting, uncertain image
This is the litany to run through my mind whilst I make the series of new collages inspired by my recent film. I’d like to find six or so collages that work which should be sufficient to refine the techniques and resolve issues. One will be fully finished using the correct materials, scale and mounting methods ready to show at Maidstone Museum in May with Making Art Work.
I want to think a bit more about how what I’m making relates to the exhibition’s theme of ‘time’. The piece involves photography and film which both inherently capture the trace of an event, trapping (freezing) it in time, although precisely what is caught is open to interpretation. The technique of collaging physically compresses the thoughts, concepts and temporal factors embedded in the original source material into a single pictorial instant.
In my new filmic collage the one piece of footage exciting me most shows shots of London through a passing train; flickering images, inside then out, a strobing billboard, flashes of colour, light and shade. It creates its own inherent montage, but the question it creates is can a still piece of collage capture anything of this shifting, dynamic nature?
Here’s a series of small test pieces exploring this issue.
I’ve done as many as I can think of this week & posted the more interesting ones above. Just need to select a ‘winner’ now to develop further!
