Read What You Look At
A Group Exhibition — Brunswick Street Gallery, 27 Nov–10 Dec, 2015
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Layering Dreams
From a very young age, I was captivated with telling stories through both words and pictures, often drawing and writing on found paper. I used to annoy my older sisters by drawing on end papers of books or by pinching paper from their school folders – if there were only one or two lines of handwriting at the top of a piece of foolscap, that was good for me to use! I’m sure I had my own drawing paper, but there was something fascinating about scavenged paper.
At art college after studying the Dadaists, I became interested in writing poetry by reassembling random words. Recycling my enormous magazine collection, I created a pool from which I could take a handful of words to compile into a ‘random poem’.
Always interested in dreams, and the surrealism intertwined with hidden meanings, this method of writing poetry appealed to me. Naturally, I’ve chosen words that I liked when I first cut them out, but sometimes I deliberately chose ones that I didn’t. This often results in some unexpected combinations that contribute to the elusive and surreal nature of dreams.
These many layers of ephemera, words, and pictures combine to evoke the otherworldly nature of dreams.
Sometimes a poem just starts with two or three words, and I slowly build on those. My poems are engaging and easy to read not only because of their brevity, but because of how they look. The fonts and colours culled from so many different sources interact with one another visually encouraging the viewer to also ‘look at what they read’.
I had begun collecting paper ephemera years ago for both its intrinsic tactile appeal and its printed content. I love history, and I love the patina of age. It’s fascinating to think about how old something is; who first bought it and held it in their hands; who wrote on it. I sourced antique papers from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s, to use as supports for the poetry collages. As well as traditional (hard copy) collages using only words, I also create digital works, combining scanned words and images cut from magazines with digital ink and paint.