∂∂
We are in Birmingham City Centre today, having a collage party. We are right next to Selfridges,
so in the heart of the ball ring, in the West Midlands.
This is an activity I do quite frequently all over the country. I'm really interested
in decision making processes and how much choice we have available to us.
I supply the materials from my collection and I allow people to come along and cut them up
and make their own work. So you can probably see from today that although the brief is very open
in terms of what they produce, it has to be a collage. And also because I've supplied all of the materials,
I have quite particular interests in terms of things that I make available.
So there's lots of encyclahedias, so I really love images of animals and big shots of landscapes
and stuff that's going on in the world. And people cut them up and make their own work from them.
It's put up in a space, so it's installed in a space, so often as a party continues,
the work will be built up on the wall and installed in response to maybe architectural details.
And I keep everybody's details, like their personal information, to add to a mailing list,
but also to keep a record of who's making what. So I'm imagining in the future that I'd like to set up
a national federation of collage artists, but also I think there's the potential for like
selecting some of the best work and maybe having an exhibition of all of these different people
who've taken part in collage party in the future.
Today has been fantastic because people were turning up before we opened, so like come in
and we had a big surge of people coming to the space as soon as we opened up at midday today.
And often these events are really family friendly, so we have a lot of children coming along,
which is really good. But today it's been a lot of adults, which is fantastic as well,
so we've got some much more sophisticated pieces of work being produced.
I like to think the collage party maybe creates quite a studio sort of environment,
where you've got lots of different people working on projects individually or in small groups
or collaborations develop, and often you know at art school or in my studio I'll be listening
to music while I'm doing that. So yeah, it's really important to create the right atmosphere
and make everybody feel welcome and relaxed, and hopefully the music provides another layer of inspiration.
