I’ve recently been playing with collage.
I’m inhabiting my inner Lee Krasner who often tore old canvas work and reinvigorated them as tremendous collage pieces. I’ve taken this idea and mashed it up a bit. Well quite a lot actually.
The process
Taking on my on-going fascination with the palimpsest, I took some canvas pieces and paper compositions I wasn’t happy with, tore them up and drew all over them with paint, permanent and metallic marker.
I then took some other canvas board and canvas pieces I’d already worked on and layered them with gold and silver leaf and wax paper. I then applied strips of my ‘customised’ canvases and paper pieces.
Once the layers were fixed, I made further marks using paint, crayon and marker to bring the pieces together.
The purpose
These were artworks made in my recent past. I wanted the pieces to reflect my deep past. Ultimately my childhood. Traditional nostalgic artworks and memoirs about childhood are so often depicted in some kind of rural ideal.
I didn’t grown up in a rural setting. I grew up in Hackney. Just off City Road. In the 70s and 80s. I went to school in Hoxton and spend Saturdays down Hoxton or Chapel Street Market or Dalston High Street. That was my childhood landscape.
I wanted these collages to reflect the eclecticism of this environment. The reflections of rain on pavement, the graffiti tags, the flora and fauna of the Regent’s Canal, the tall buildings, the quality of light. The noise and the silence.
I also wanted these pieces to be about love. So I took tremendous care in putting them together.
As the past is a construct. These pieces are deliberately fragile as I am an unreliable narrator. It’s just my memories. My sensations and my truth not THE truth.
They really deal with my journeys to and from places. I walked a lot in my childhood. We didn’t have a car. While we lived centrally we had a bit of a walk to Old Street tube and the Angel. There were a lot of long streets and canal meanders. And a lot of clashing architecture. And it’s those contradictions and juxtapositions I wish to navigate in these works.
