I’ve always made collage. They were the earliest bits of what you might call ‘art’, and I have continued to make them, privately, for birthday cards and so on, but have never really thought much about how they work. Over the last couple of years I’ve got more serious about them, what’s going on in them.
All painting is a way of negotiating a surface, so I suppose these are no different; careful constructions that allow one element to follow along from another until I achieve an overall sense of completion.
They are named, titled, by randomly choosing lines of poems. W. S. Graham and John Ashberry are my favourites, the one because of his constant picking over what language is, the other, his continuous unexpectedness.
Then there is a shift from the architectonic nature of still-life constructions to something more akin to gardening: they become spaces for the eye and mind to wander in.
