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I find that after a while it's quite hard to create ideas, so it's really important that I go out and about and especially being a collage artist like trying to source new material.
So I'm going to talk about a trip to New York and then also how like some days out recently of how it's produced like new work.
So last October I went to New York for a month and that was kind of because I've been working for two years like building my portfolio and I wanted to try and like meet some new people and experience like a creative atmosphere somewhere other than London.
And it happened to me at the time that I got asked to exhibit in Brooklyn part of an exhibition called All That Remains which is sort of lots of collage artists coming together and just putting on a show just for the sake of having a show.
So I decided to produce all the work over there and so I went out on the plane with no work for an exhibition that was in two weeks so it's kind of risky.
But I think it's paid off and I'll show you some of the work that I produced while I was out in New York.
So I spent quite a few times like just going out and looking in like junkyards and around New York and the streets like lots of people set up stalls and they like sell books so kind of spent time exploring that.
And also there's this famous bookshop called The Strand which is about 100 years old and there's books ranging from like a dollar and there's thousands and thousands of books so I spent quite a lot of time there.
And then this is some of the material that I collected.
As you can see it's like I quite like a lot of nature so it's quite based on that but also while I was out there I found a lot of material to do with like dancers so you can see the guy corner.
I think through the work what was really important to me was that it was a reflection of my time in New York.
I wasn't going for a theme I was just letting what the books that I found and the material that I saw just lead the work that I produced.
So the first piece this is called Birds of Eden.
I found this guy in a knitting book and I kind of thought he was quite funny because he has such a serious look and such a ridiculous jumper.
I just wanted to kind of poke fun at it.
There's like no overarching like concept behind it.
There's no like grand story other than that he just looks a bit silly.
This piece was produced because I picked up a lot of books with dancers as I said and I kind of wanted to produce something that had a bit more thought behind it and kind of just explored the idea of like ballerinas and motion and also was quite paired back.
A lot of my work is very colourful and very vibrant and to me trying to produce something that was quite monotone is quite hard but I think the result in collage is quite serene and you can spend quite a lot of time exploring it.
Then this piece was a sort of offshoot of the main one where I wanted to look at how you can produce motion in collage and explore the idea of a woman spinning on the spot and lots of different people layered up and also like the main ball at the bottom is like little dots that kind to me were like if you're spinning on the spot you make little points to curve around.
And then this one's a bit more of a literal interpretation so I went to a flea market in Brooklyn and there was loads and like thousands of postcards in this one place and I think I spent about three hours just sifting through and the piece is called Wish You Were Here.
So it's kind of a collection of postcards obviously there's like an overarching theme that they're postcards but the aesthetic and the visual imagery is quite different.
Yeah so like throughout all the pieces you can see there's not really a main theme between them other than like for me it's like personal nostalgia because when I look over what I produced I kind of after I got over the horror of trying to produce this many pieces in three days I kind of look back and I think oh that's where I got that book from and that's the exhibition where I met all these nice people and it's just for me it's really important because I spent a lot of my time producing commercial work for people and it doesn't matter.
It doesn't have that sort of depth and personality to it.
As well as like going on holiday I like to go on day trips and just go around and rummage through like charity shops and car boot sales and find books.
So I've been like started collecting some observer books not for the imagery because the copyright issues can't really use them but just because they cover subjects really in depth and they're just really interesting to look at.
And I think I like to collect my encyclopedias as well because when you're trying to find inspiration you can just flick through and they have like such a wealth of subjects that you can come inspired by things that you didn't even think would necessarily relate to what you were working on.
It's also some books like How and Why series they're from the 50s and they're for children and they're quite simple diagrams and easy for me to understand and I just kind of I don't use them but it's quite nice to have something on each subject and just you can get inspired from them.
And this is a piece called Watermelon Poppy that is one of two that I produced when I was at my nan's house and I was going through the garage and I found these pictures of the women like in the centre.
And they're from the 1950s and they're a lot of women in bathing suits and some of them a bit x rated but these are some of the better ones and I just thought it was a really nice day and I outside my nan had been working on the garden and there was loads of flowers everywhere and I just kind of wanted to produce something that was like reminiscent of the day that I'd spent there.
So this is the other piece that I produced and again like it I let the collage sort of lead itself I didn't really have like a theme or like something that I want to produce from it and it's got like hints of things that like the bird is a wren which visits my nan's garden and she goes crazy for it so it's like small things like that that when I look over it is really quite personal to me.
And this is another similar piece but I produced it because I went to Arundel which is just outside Brighton and it's a really nice town sort of village and it's got a castle and I found this book with a Kodak advert of this girl and this is in response to a theme that was for a competition and it's called Happiness Is and this is called Eve Before the Fall because it's just her before she takes the bite of the apple.
And then this is a recent trip I went to Winchester which is just outside Southampton I don't know if anyone's been there but it's a really nice place and they have a little charity shop so I spent times like roaming around there and just found like books on flowers and obviously butterflies and then for this talk we were asked to produce a poster to sell for charity and I just thought it was a really good opportunity to bring together the work that the books that I had found and like make some work.
And when I was in Winchester I was sat on the bench and all these birds flocking around this crazy lady feeding them by just for the phrase birds of feather and then that's what I produced from just writing that down and collecting the books that day.
I think I wanted to just make the point that it's really important I don't know whatever you do that you go outside your comfort zone and you make sure you explore and just become inspired because it's quite easy to stagnate.
