Monday 13 June 2011

Close ups and black outs

I've been using my black and white collages as an element of a lot of my work for the past year or so - I produced about 20 of them at first - I blutacked them all onto my bedroom walls as I made them and what became immediately apparent was how patterns would emerge out at me like bizarre imaginary landscapes... or ligaments, buildings, cityscapes, creatures and faces - sometimes all of these and much more all at the same time.  Like my brain created associations - though never fully settled on any of them.  So when I photocopied all these collages I sometimes used to draw out the associations by darkening certain areas with black marker.

So what started out as this:


Became this:


Which to me brought out the image of a strange mechanical heart running a mechanism of chaotic unconnected non-cogs.  Like a the centre of a planet which is spinning the world wildly and uncontrolled around it whilst fragmented cities build bizarre and unnecessary and inevitable structures.

Here are a few more:

This looks like a skull or x ray telepathically linked to a far off malevolent nothingness.  Links between the dead and near dead - neither is which is fully aware of the other or even of themselves - much like life it's a wild flailing smothered by a leaden control mechanism.

Here is a creature with a very thin neck and a very large overbite.  Made out of junk and old bits of food it doesn't so much as digest but dissolve but only in certain places - making it freeze into a fixed position - a creaky statue trying to move but without the necessary gunk in it's joints for elasticity.

Some half formed organism unable to connect with it's own limbs, sort of comatose and unaware of itself throwing out elements of it's thinking and feeling mind onto some chaotic 2D computer game platform created simplistically from a lack of it's comprehension of a wider image.  The background is spinning but the foreground spins with it at the same velocity - but at a further distance.  Even though it's closer.  Somehow it's never all completely lined up but it exists in a series of very limiting compartments.  All of which exist in a constant yet remain unreachable.

Inside these compartments - and they are reachable, really, it all just buzzes through some sort of mixed static that shift - like daydreams on the bus when I reality clouds over and things pool together into one big intangible thought process.

Finally a graveyard ligament - a disconnected shoulder bone bridged to another - connective tissues building faces and life forms and showing the organic in the still and happening.  A bit like these words - somehow a bit pretentious and overly non specific.  But unlike these words these images aren't trying to second guess their audience - because I think when it comes to the imagery and not the explanation of what I see in the imagery I don't impose anything on the audience or expect it to need an explanation.
So as a small sample and perhaps not even a best possible example (maybe better examples later) I was hoping to to get across how having these things on my walls gave me an awful lot to stare at and brought up associations I never really knew existed - even though I made them.  Although that's not exactly some big achievement of knowledge, if anything creating abstract collages from stills of abstract animations created from photographs of my collages, paintings and drawings is likely to entirely blur my sense of association into an out of focus globule - though due to having perfect eyesight the blurry globule is certainly quite sharp and pixellated.  It's me living in a world of my own head of constant opposites and contradictions.  I'm so accustomed to not being accustomed that I'm rather accustomed.

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