It started with something I bought myself for Mother’s Day. I have three wonderful children but as a single parent I feel totally justified in adopting a belt-and-braces approach when it comes to such a celebration of gratitude and always get myself a present. It also means I never feel short-changed or forgotten if my offspring are–completely understandably–focussing on their own lives and miss the notification on the appropriate Sunday morning. Or get it confused with Mother’s Day in America, or indeed France; my son’s girlfriend is French.
Anyway, back to me. I have always loved collage but have not done any for ages, and I saw a book that looked fun, so purchased it from the fabulous World of Books. I started using a few of the images and spent a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon cutting and pasting while watching back to back episodes of Death in Paradise on iPlayer. Bliss. As I was experimenting, I used some things cut out of National Geographic magazine, and enjoyed using the people:
I wanted to try using a background or backdrop instead of a blank page of my sketchbook, so I harvested some photographic spreads from the aforementioned mags, and started to chop and stick my way in to creating some scenes. I love collage as you can just make art using ready-made media, so somehow it seems a very pure form of creativity to me as all the choices are mine; the only element of me is what I choose to cut out and how I choose to arrange it, and everyone has access to the same resources, potentially.
I love playing with scale and juxtaposition – something so easy to achieve with collage and arguably, its most common form. The substitution of colours and materials is wonderful, and the incongruity and weirdness really fascinates me.
Here are my works in progress. Some are similar colours, some tell a story, some are about shapes and visual contrast. Some make me smile because the setting is so ridiculous compared to where I found the original image, and that ‘private joke’ or intimate aspect of collage is a great way to keep hold of images that otherwise would be difficult to utilise. I find it incredibly absorbing and love the huge mess of paper clippings that’s generated.
Let me know what you think.
