home

During my undergraduate studies at Montserrat College of Art, I was formally introduced to collage in a Modern context. Before this, I had a preconceived, dismissive notion that collage was just the act of cutting up old magazines and gluing scenes together to make, at best, an involved story, and at worst, people with stars and rockets coming out of their heads. I had never taken abstraction seriously, partly because my previous interactions with the idea of abstraction were mostly based on nothing or very little. I didn’t know it at the time, but to me, it was a disingenuous venture that led nowhere. Since then, it has opened my eyes to many new avenues that I would’ve dismissed before. To be frank, my collages have transformed my work, so now it’s all about sizes, shape, color and lines. Lines created by the edges of form, or from adding drawn line. 

My collages vary in size, becoming as intimate as something held close in the hand, or as massive and unwieldy as Upswingin, a collaborative piece I created with Alex Pint for an exhibition by the same name. You can read more about the exhibition here. They are usually created from a mixture of found materials, paper, and old worn book pages. Stripes have become a recurring theme found throughout all of my work, but originated in my collage endeavors. As an inherited interest from my mentor and colleague Timothy Harney, stripes have found their way into every crevice of my artistic and personal lives. They have the opportunity to answer some of the geometric problems that are involved within collage, and within my work in its entirety. The grid is another large part of my work, either sticking strictly to the geometric entanglement that plagues work created on a flat surface. As the great abstract expressionist and educator Hans Hofmann stressed, the first lines on a piece of art aren’t the ones you draw, they’re the four edges of the page. 

Dry Media