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In my current practice I look at the relationship between collage and screen print. Through using layering techniques, mark making and assemblage, I explore how the history of the mark, the image and the layer can be held in one space, bringing a multitude of fractured processes into a whole.
My work is informed by literature, film and political theory, I often archive and draw from narratives of tension, alienation and connection, to develop a visual commentary of this research. By combining erratic, expressive marks with geometric layers and obtuse shapes I create work that holds a disjuncture between balance and disorder.
First studying on a Film and English degree at Salford University in 2014, I found my passion for language and literature, specifically in authors work such as Jeanette Winterson and Anne Carson, who’s writing commentates on social issues but is rooted in the magic and the mundane. Later transferring onto a Visual Arts degree in 2015, I was inspired to translate these stories and descriptions of the world around me into my own visual language.
Finding a medium to communicate these ideas with was a challenge at first, however upon discovering collage I began using this to assemble my thoughts into a visual diagram or a ‘web of imagery’, later drawing out and working on smaller designs and sections. Collage has allowed me to connect ideas that had previously felt fragmented and disjointed, which is something that I have found can be utilised and celebrated in collage. For example, through ignoring the order of a ready-made image or design I can then re-imagine and assemble a new meaning and form. I am often fascinated by images of the body and consumable objects, dissecting, replicating and reassembling limbs, natural and commercial environments to represent a fractured and disorientated depiction of what might have otherwise appeared as routine or ordinary.
Discovering screen printing later in my undergraduate degree, opened me up to a world of colour exploration and layering techniques, I am drawn to the playfulness and lightness of pastel colours, contrasting this with darker, tonal reds and oranges. For me, working with print is an expanded form of collaging and communicating tension and balance, by adding and reducing texture and colour in each print or layer, I rework and reassemble areas of the composition. I find screen printing to be an immediate process which suits my inclination to work quickly and sporadically, responding to each print directly after each pull of the squeegee, however I have since found that this medium slows me down, allowing me to think carefully in terms of how each print will affect the conditions of the next or previous layer.
Currently studying for an MFA in fine art at Sheffield Hallam University, I combine these collage and screen-printing techniques into multi layered pieces, I hope to develop this further by working on a larger scale and to introduce and set a new layer of collaged imagery as the focal point in each design. I have also recently touched upon experimenting with new materials such as collaging with audio, film and found footage, which has allowed me to expand my methods of collaging into the digital realm, introducing a new way of combining two opposing elements into my work.
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