Pop Scruff

A selection of small collages and paintings created between 2001 and now. These have been an ongoing thing for me for a long time. In a school art class we were once asked to create a piece that reflected our identity. After a false start with a very illustrative pen and ink drawing, my teacher made me go home and do it again but with the instruction that I needed to be more honest. Coincidently, at the time I was also studying James Joyce and was intrigued by the concept of the stream of consciousness. I was interested in early modernist and psychoanalytic approaches to revealing and thus understanding yourself through automatic writing, collage and doodling. The result was that I went back into school with a collage much like these. It contained pretty much everything that was laying around my teenage bedroom and/or was whirling around in my head. Years later, I started to make them again as a source for my paintings – sometimes you just need something to paint! As I get older, I alternate between just having the collages or turning them into paintings. It really depends on my mood and how soon the next exhibition is coming up.