Process statement
My practice combines photography and collage in the digital workspace of Adobe Photoshop. Initially, I construct collages with torn or cut paper- from books and magazines or my own printmaking and painting experiments. Once I have scanned these into my files, I begin to look for connections between an image and a background. I have years of shooting in my photography archives and I continue to shoot, often with a specific body of work in mind. In Photoshop, I try to find connections between my photo-files and the scanned collage files.
Collage allows me to extract a gesture or detail out of the photograph's context of time and space. The fragmentary nature of collage connects to the idea of perception- the collaged image is both familiar and elusive, an idea of a place rather than a document.
Inherent to the process is the search for unity or gestalt - the whole that becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Working digitally offers an expansion of ways to unify. It's easy to adjust color or size but to apply the principles of art: repetition, balance, variety, proportion, emphasis and movement involves the same intellectual challenge that analogue construction techniques require.
In the end, my digital collages become physical objects. I print them on an Epson printer on rag paper as limited edition prints. Sometimes I rework the surfaces with colored pencil which creates a variable edition but these surface alterations are minimal because the work of unifying was already done in the digital space.