Could you introduce yourself a bit? Where are you from and what is your background? 

My name is Ricardo Miguel Hernández Acevedo. I am a photographer and visual artist born and raised at the corner of the old Presidential Palace, today the Museum of the Revolution, in Old Havana, Cuba. I am also a twin. I can't help saying it because for me it has always been a pride to be physically equal to my brother. His name is Ricardo Ángel Hernández Acevedo and, since we are twins, it is very common for people, in addition to calling me by my first name, to also call me “Jimagua”. We both had an interest in art from a very young age. I taught myself photography about 14 years ago, and since then photography has been a central way to express myself in my career, although I have also worked with video art, installation and cinema. Despite all of this, I have a very strong preference for still images within these three manifestations.

What were some of your earliest artistic experiences? 

As I have mentioned before, I started working on photography 14 years ago. In the beginning, when I was studying in a small photography course, I limited myself more to observing the world around me, instead of going out with the camera and taking photos. In fact, you rarely see me with a camera. Usually, after having thought about the idea I want to convey, I look for the scene and very calmly get to work. I make sketches and observe the light. It is in analytical observation that I find what I am looking for. I consider myself more a photographer of ideas than of moments. Of course, between one idea and another there are different aesthetic and conceptual interests that lead me to operate in many ways. Working on a photographic series can take me several days, months or years. This is how a few well-known works were born here on the island, which have been exhibited especially in Europe, such as “Living with the enemy”, in 2006, “Developer”, from 2012, and “Ella”, made between 2014 and 2017.

How did you discover collage for yourself? 

I have to confess that I never had any interest in collage. In my studies, I gave priority to other creative forms, such as painting, of which I am a great admirer, and of course photography. In Cuba, it is not very common to find an exhibition where they show collages. There is no collage community or organisation on the island. So if I did see any collage work, it was on the Internet or in a book by a foreign artist. With this I do not mean that there are no artists who do collage in the country. Only that they do not do it as something constant, but rather that it may constitute a complementary stage of the work of a Cuban artist. On top of that, I also saw a lot of poorly assembled collages on the Internet, and that didn't motivate me to start with "cut and paste" work.  

This situation changed one day when I studied the European artistic avant-garde of the 20th century. I am fascinated by the collages of Kurt Schwitters, George Grosz, Hannah Hoch, Max Ernst and Raoul Hausmann. From the latter, I appropriated one of his works of sound poetry for my collages. They have a visual and conceptual power that has been difficult for me to find in contemporary art collage. However, I must clarify that I did find contemporary collagists with very good work. 

At home, I had a bunch of small, old photographs that were badly damaged. They were not part of my own photographic collection. They were part of purchases that I made a long time ago, and that had included some other documents that were of interest to me at that time. They were all in a drawer full of dust. Forgotten. One day, without thinking, I cut out one of these photos and pasted it on top of another. It was extremely organic. The result was fascinating to me. This is how my work on collage began. After that, I couldn't stop.

How would you describe your style in your own words?

I never consciously thought of my own style. I have always felt that it is a process that evolves over time in terms of form and content.

The first collages I made looked like everyday scenes from anywhere. I focused on making portraits, alternating them with other collages, with diverse situations with a historical, social and political background. I was like that for quite some time. While shaping the scene within the work, I also discovered ways to put them together. 

Even if it is important for me to build a scene starting from some photos, more important is the process of searching for those photos. I have spent days rummaging through the drawers and boxes of people from whom I have bought photographs; although I have also bought them in antique markets in Havana. Other times I have found them thrown on the the ground or in a trash can. Sometimes I have bought them and other times people have given them to me. The important thing is that all these photos, before I acquired them, were doomed to disappear. Most of them are very conventional, without any interesting motive within the image, but by separating a fragment and assembling it with others, it is immortalized in a collage.

Is there a recurring theme that you work with often?

For some time now, my works, especially the most recent ones, have been on the subject of landscape. Collage, as a construction of the image, allows me to explore and reinvent myself by assembling and juxtaposing a preconceived dramaturgy of the Cuban and foreign landscape, looking for possible relationships between diverse landscapes. 

My landscapes are not only symbolic constructions of different terrains, but they are also the platform to show diverse historical and social situations.

You work with a lot of old photographs. Is there any other medium you'd like to work with? 

At the moment I am immersed in my work with the photographic archive. I have tried to experiment with other materials, but for the moment everything has been "an experimentation" and nothing else.  

Did Covid and the global chaos it caused affect your work and life? If so, how? 

Covid has affected everyone. That is a fact. Since this pandemic began, I have had no mobility whatsoever. Already in itself, the precariousness that exists in my country meant that it was limited by the constant day to day problems: the complex transport situation, the shortage of food products, the lack of information, and the limitations to access it, etc. All this makes you use all your energy looking for how to solve your personal problems. Now with Covid, in addition to the aforementioned problems that have worsened, there is the confinement, the lack of work, a worse economy as a result of the shortage of tourism, and finally the lack of food. Locked up in our houses, waiting for a miracle to happen. It is from this precariousness that I find myself drinking to create my photo collages. Now the dynamics have changed, and everything is on the Internet and on social networks. There has been an increase in online exhibitions, and I try to make the most of the opportunities that virtual space offers me.

How do you plan to evolve as an artist? 

That's something I don't think about much. I am not used to devising future strategies. Of course, I worry about promoting my work. Until now, I have been fortunate to exhibit every year inside and outside of Cuba, and to show my work in different publications. But I let everything in my life flow and happen organically. I focus on hard work and let God do his will.

Is collage a popular art form in Cuba? Can you tell us a bit about your local art scene? 

Cuba has always been characterized as one of the most important venues for Latin American and Caribbean art. The Island is well known for the Cuban pictorial avant-garde of the 30s and 40s; the revolutionary graphic posters of the 60s and 70s; revolutionary epic photography also from those decades, and the emergence of new contemporary art that developed in the 1980s.

The Cuban art scene is rich in its variety and breadth. Even so, for reasons I don't know, collage did not fit into the Cuban artist's creation the same way painting, sculpture, and photography did, or as it did in other countries in America and Europe. There has never been an organisation or group of collage artists. It was part of the creative process of some artists throughout our history though. For example, there are two very isolated cases, that of the painter Raúl Martínez and the photographer Eduardo Hernández, who have both conscientiously made collages almost throughout their whole careers without neglecting painting and photography. In addition, I think it is necessary to mention a much more isolated case, someone who has become known especially in Europe for his unique work within the Art Brut movement: José Alberto Cadi, aka the diver. Others, to a greater or lesser extent, have worked with collage as part of their work. Artists like Aldo Menéndez, Ezequiel Suárez, Sandra Ceballos, Glexis Novoa and Nelson Villalobos come to mind.

Who are some living local artists, collage or not, who you think we should know about?

Undoubtedly, two artists with extensive careers who have worked on collage (very good collages, too) are Eduardo Hernández and Nelson Villalobos. The first with a marked homoerotic discourse in Cuban photography, and the second with a very interesting pictorial aesthetic in which there is a great interest in cubism, the European avant-garde of the 20th century, and North American popular art. 

Other artists with interesting works in collage, and from my generation, are Evelyn Aguilar Sánchez, Michel Armenteros, Nelson Barrera and Julio Llopis. 

Ricardo Miguel Hernández Acevedo web IG
interview & translation: Petra Zehner

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on February 02, 2021

As always first things first, could you please introduce yourself a little? Where did you grow up, what do you do, and what were some of your first important art experiences?

I grew up in a suburb near Aarhus in Denmark. It is near the sea and the forest. Just as much as I love the City, just as much I am addicted to being close to nature. After moving around, studying, working and having my first child,  I now live here again, with my husband and our two teenagers.

I  graduated as a textile designer from Designskolen Kolding in Denmark in 99 and have worked freelance as a print designer for fashion and interior design. 10 years ago I began working as an art educator at an art school for kids and young people, a work that I love!

My first important art experience was probably when I was about 14 and got my first camera, and learned how to develop my own pictures in the darkroom, but I guess also my discovering of the Spanisch artist Antoni Tapies and his beautiful raw abstract work.

Do you do anything other than collage, creativity-wise?

Besides working as an art educator, I work freelance as a designer/illustrator, having worked in many different creative areas.

When and how did your passion for collage start?

I have spent some time finding a direction that felt right, but at 19, I had a very serious accident, and during recovery, I immersed myself even more into art and design, and here I also discovered many collage artists.

I was good at illustrating textures and surfaces, and my art teacher at that time encouraged me to apply for the School of Arts and Crafts. I often used collage for sketching, and inspiration on my moodboard in the design process. Some professors encouraged me to work more seriously with my collages/mixed media, but at that time, I was more interested in becoming a designer, working with textile design. I have used my collages in different media. They have also been used as background illustrations on a series of children's books in collaboration with my husband, who works as an illustrator. Some of them have been exhibited at the Biennale of Illustrations in Bologna and Bratislava.

3 years ago I had a very stressful period, and making collages again made me totally relax, and it felt very natural to do, it was like coming home :-) and I began, maybe for the first time, to take my collage making more seriously.

How would you describe your style in your own words?

I like a raw surface with a graphic expression, but still also a bit sensitive and poetic. I like to tell stories. I´m still developing, I have promised myself to add more color in my work in the future :-)

What about collage as a medium speaks to you?

Collage is an artform where I can express myself better than in any other media. The graphic expression, and the mix of different elements, layers and objects, coming together, just speaks to me. I love the whole process of making a collage. As a designer I have worked a lot with digital designs, and I have also worked with digital collages, but it is the analog process and expression, where I really get my hands in the materials that I prefer to work with.

Your work feels very retro. Where and how do you find and choose the materials you work with?

I have so many great photo albums from my family back to the 1920s.  I love to look in them, so much history and aesthetics in the b/w photos and I sometimes use them in my collages. I also use vintage magazines and old books that I find in antique and secondhand stores, that is probably why my work has got a retro vibe.

Do you ever feel guilty about tearing up books ? I always ask because I do ...

I know what you mean :-) I really love books and love to read. I grew up with books everywhere in our house. But the books I use, I often find stacked away in boxes in secondhand shops, not in a good shape. I love the old paper in them and the good bookbinding, and I just convince myself that I rescue them, and give them a new life in a new story, maybe a kind of upcycling ;-)

How, assuming it does, is creativity helping you through the pandemic.?

Being creative is what I do, but definitely in the beginning of the pandemic it has sometimes been a kind of an escape room.

Any words of advice to people just starting out with collage?

Experiment! The best way to find your own way of expression. There will always be one way or style that suits you best and feels more natural and right for you.

Anne Misfeldt IG
Interview: Petra Zehner

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on January 31, 2021

As always first things first, could you please introduce yourself a little? Where are you from, what do you do, and if there is anything else you would like us to know, please do tell…

Hello. I’m Jake Kennedy and I work in an old petrol station converted into studio space in Hove in Sussex in the UK. I’m an analogue collage artist working with old bits and bobs. I don’t let computers get near the creating of my work, but I’m friendly with a scanner to get them online and onto Instagram, a medium which has totally invigorated my practice and the chance for people to see it.

Why Butternut Collage?

I wish I could say it had a deep meaning but that’s part of the joy of it really, it’s a bit silly, it isn’t supposed to be pretentious, and is in itself a collage I suppose – butter and a nut. Soft and hard.

Your IG profile says anti-selfie and Luddite, so of course we have to ask about that too.

It’s just a hint at me being more interested in old worn things than sparkly new things. I buy old clothes, my bike is from the 70s, I like old music. I dunno, it’s not a mission statement or anything, but I do prefer analogue collage to digital. While there are some amazing digital collagers out there I wouldn’t know where to start with that, so maybe it’s jealousy.

As for the selfies – they just make my flesh crawl. I’d rather see what someone can make, rather than what they look like. It’s an irrelevance. I’d rather see what’s on the other side of the camera that’s pointing at someone’s pouting face.

Your website says you’ve been doing collage since forever? Would you care to elaborate on that?

Ha yeh, I nicked that slogan from a skateboard brand, but it does feel like I’ve been doing it forever. I think my first collage was in 1993, at school. And it’s been more or less ongoing since then, although I took a good few years out here and there. I tried printing, and writing, but collage just stuck. Nowadays it’s all I really do. It doesn’t pay the bills – the boring writing does – but it’s definitely something I give waaaay more time to than anything else.

Was collage a medium that spoke to you from the beginning, or was this more of an accidental encounter?

Yes and no. Believe it or not, I used to have a phobia of wet paper. So although I liked the results of collage in the early days, it was kinda repulsive to me. I’ve overcome it now.

When I first started, I liked the easy humour of it. It seemed to easy. You could make funny facial juxtapositions, or put slogans where they shouldn’t be. It was sort of punk rock. And so easy to do – you just needed glue and scissors. There’s also something non-committal about it – if you don’t stick something down, you can move bits around until you’re happy, which is great for composing a piece. And I’ve said it before, but if you want a hand or a phone in a piece, you don’t have to go to the trouble of actually drawing either, you can just cut them out from somewhere.

Do you do any other kind of art?

I was a linocut printer for a few years before I fell properly back into collage. But it was just too hard! And messy. I feel a bit sorry for linocut, like I abandoned it, but there are so many talented printers out there – especially here in Brighton & Hove - that it can support itself. Collage felt like I’d come home.

Since you’ve been doing this forever, have you noticed any developments or trends in the collage world? Other than the obvious move to digital techniques.

Err, there’s seems to be a nice recklessness about it now which there never used to be. And people seem to have embraced the fact that abstraction, the decaying, the torn and the downright destroyed can make beautiful images.

Source material, and people’s attitudes to it, have/has changed as well. Nowadays you might find someone has exactly the same books as you, so there’s more of a search for exclusivity, especially if you’re working in an analogue way.

You’re looking for something no one’s used before, or maybe even seen. I love National Geographic and its kodachrome colours in the 1940s/50s, but so many people are working with those images too. And maybe that means collage feels more competitive in this century. Whereas in the 1990s, even the early 00s, there was no showcasing/showboating on Instagram – which of course I’m guilty of too - so you just pleased yourself, which had a purity.

The flipside of that is that social media’s a great tool for research and seeing other artists’ work, people who can take it further than you, have better skills, or do things you’d never have thought of doing yourself. 

Has your own style and practice developed over the past almost three decades, and if so, how?

I’ve got more skilled at precision and accuracy I think, and I’ve learned more about colour. I’m more able to spot clichéd stuff I do better (but not always). Editing and deciding what I don’t show has taken on more of a key role. I’ve stopped using space backgrounds. I’ve tried to stop replacing people’s heads with ‘wacky’ things. I stopped using ‘readable’ chunks of text. That’s about it.

I’m just forging on, not sure each day where I’m going with it. Which is ok.

Do you have any idea as to how many collages you have created over the years?

Erm, no, not really, but it’s in the thousands definitely. I’d say it’s between 2,000 and 3,000. Although many of those are absolutely rubbish.

Did you do any collaborations or projects that you are particularly proud of and/or want to share with us?

I’ve just done some pieces for an auction for a Hepatitis charity which was so nice to be asked to do. I also offered each and every collage on my insta for £20 for the Australian wildfire charity last year, and raised nearly a grand for that, which meant a lot of trips to the post office. Basically, if someone’s willing to pay for a piece of mine, I’m over the moon.

Sadly, I’ve never done a collaboration though. Get in touch if you’re interested, collage world.

You seem to use vintage ephemera almost exclusively. Do you ever work with other, maybe contemporary materials?

Not so much. The main proviso is tone – a cutting from the 1980s usually doesn’t work with one from the 1950s, for example – although sometimes they do – and I’m always learning more and more about composition. I’ve learnt not to stick anything down until the last minute. Lots of pieces don’t work, and they don’t see the light of day, but with collage you can move onto the next thing quite easily. It’s a brilliant medium for the short attention span/Instagram generation, but also for someone like me who spends all their time in flea markets and boot sales and whatnot.

Are there any artists who particularly influenced you?

Initially it wasn’t visual art. I mean, I quite enjoy what I’ve see of the process of Peter Blake, how he has a magpie approach to his 3D collages particularly, and the great voids of Mark Rothko - Cy Twombly too, what seems like chaos but isn’t.

But my main visual influences, subconsciously, were more from comedy and music at first – Vic & Bob, Chris Morris, Pavement, Warp - loads of record sleeves actually, that sort of thing. I’ve always liked things that were slightly out of context but that then go on to make their own new one.

Can you tell us a little bit about the titles of your pieces? Where do they come from? From where do you draw inspiration?

I never have titles first, that’s for sure. I either just try and make something funny, or abstract, or completely non-related to the image. They’re the three strands I think. Someone like @moonloops on Instagram is a master of titles, with his little snatches of what almost makes sense.

As for inspiration, I have a ton of images in my studio that are uncut in folders, or mags, or books, or photo albums, which I add to all the time, then I tend to just leaf through them each morning and see what jumps out.

I often get triggered by a cutting/advert/photo, and then spend ages trying to pair it up with another. Or increasingly I’ll see how it can be deconstructed or destroyed completely and work with just the remnants. It can take an age, or a few minutes.

There’s not really a set way I work, but you’re right, you do need the inspiration and sometimes it just doesn’t come – and that’s normally when I need to go shopping for more raw material which usually gets the ball rolling again.

Jake Kennedy web IG
interview: Petra Zehner

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on September 18, 2020

As always one of our first questions: where are you from and when and how did you start to explore art?

I’m a travelled French person. Born in Asia, where my parents lived and worked as expats. I arrived in Europe in the mid 70’s where I lived until the early 80’s when we moved again, to California for a few years. Came back as a teenager, my folks settled in Paris and I kept travelling and living abroad until 2018 when I finally came back to Paris with my newly-wedded wife.

I reckon my first significant art experience, apart from kindergarten dry pasta masterpieces, was in junior high school in Los Angeles where I befriended a Japanese kid who drew manga style comics. He had a drawing notebook that he filled like a fanzine, with imaginary articles, stories, music reports, album covers, show posters, ads and the likes.

His drawings were really funny and subversive and I quickly had my own notebook, trying my best to draw as well as him, still trying to this day!

He was my mentor in many ways, and we spent days goofing around, skateboarding, drawing and listening to Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys.

I know you have quite a diverse, especially for French standards, professional background. Do you have any formal art training though?

I have no art training apart from that. One day, his parents moved to another state and that was that. I kept drawing on my own, eventually my little sister got to emulation and started drawing in that same Americano-manga style. She later went to proper art school and became a talented plastic artist. I never followed that path, rather went to business studies to please my family’s expectations.

That was the time when skate and surf graphics were booming and I was really attracted by the many cool images that came out on tees, boards and especially stickers. I would cover everything with theses skate/surf stickers in my home, appliance, furniture, you name it.

I guess this was my first & early approach to working with adhesive, sticky stuff, which today has become my speciality, I really loved the transparent stickers as they were really easy to blend and mingle together. Nowadays I just create my own stickers with scotch tape.

Oh yeah I just remembered that I had art training in the past, but that was for Russian theatre so nothing to do with collage !

What originally drew you to collage?

I’m a trained actor and voice over actor, obviously not a 9 to 5 occupation, therefore providing me with a lot of spare time. I was working for a production company in London for a while, and when we weren’t in production I had plenty of time to fill in the office. So out of boredom really I started flipping through magazines and thought of applying scotch tape on the images and texts I liked, and then tearing it off to give me a brand new transparent sticker that I would apply on any surface around me. Then I thought of grouping all these « stickers » on a canvas, a heavy A4 paper, and that’s how it all started. 

I don’t consider my work collage as I don’t use any « colle » (glue), I prefer calling it montage.

How would you describe your work and collages in your own words?

Retro-kitsch analog montage!

I’ve seen some of your collages in real life. Online reproductions don’t give them justice. Would you mind describing the technique you use to create and the way you later display them?

My technique is similar to waxing, you know when people get hair removed in beauty salons: I source an image I like, lay transparent tape on it, and press hard for the adhesive to act and swoosh, tear it off!

That’s all I use, transparent adhesive tape and a bit of scissors.  Completely glue-less!

Unfortunately the chemical formula on the tape nowadays isn’t as strong as 10 years back so the tearing doesn’t work as much as it did, i.e. less paper and ink stay on the tape when I tear so I do use scissors a whole lot more these days. It changed my working method a bit, back in the days, my work was more of a throw-up, I would tear an image off and just place it anywhere I deemed right on my canvas. Today my work is more constructed and planned, images are more sourced.

All my originals are A4 size, sometime A3. Small stuff. And hard to display as it’s full of transparent tape that catches all the reflections. And tape doesn’t age well, it waves, dries and make your canvas concave.

I therefore scan all of my works to get rid of these tape related problems and then print them out in big, the bigger the better! I have never shown or sold an original.

Most of the pieces I have sold were printed on metallic photo paper and then mounted on dibond. Usually in 80x60cm size but also on larger 150x110cm pieces. The others were printed on canvas, metal, cotton, glass, ceramic… we can print on anything these days.

I totally agree with you that online reproductions do not give them any justice as they are so precisely detailed that one has to see them in big, a great incentive for me to have more exhibits!

How long do you usually work on a piece? Collage can be a rather quick and spontaneous medium – some people always finish in one sitting – or take forever. Your work seems to fall on the time-consuming end of the spectrum. Am I correct?

Partly. It depends on preparation. Like a stir fry. Either I prepare all my ingredients first or use my good old throw up method where I just flick through books and mags, and tear and stick as I progress. My recent pieces are once again more organized so I choose my big features and then apply the tear & stick technique to bind them all together.

The quickest pieces took me six hours to make but sometimes I get stuck, can’t find the right combination for an area of my canvas and thrive for 2 days!

And now a rather practical/technical question. You use a lot of tape in your work. Have you ever had problems with the adhesive affecting the paper? And if so, do you have any advice/tales of caution for people trying to work with tape?

As I mentioned earlier, tape has its flaws, but isn’t plastic just fantastic?!

All jokes aside, it does affect the paper one uses as canvas, I therefore work on 300g Black paper that is more resistant to concaving.

I keep my originals under a herbarium press so they stay flat forever. I also scan them as soon as they are finished to keep a hi-def master in digital.

But I wouldn’t consider myself a tape artist, such as Max Zorn for example,

I’m just a mere tape-transferer.

You use a lot of images from the 50s and 60s, pin-up girls, movie stills, and advertisements. What appeals to you about these images?

I mostly use people in my work, hardly any buildings, tools, instruments, vehicles, or other objects. Originally my aim was to glorify the kitsch iconography of these times of pulp fictions or man’s adventures books, film & roman noir, and retro advertising.

My first collection on exhibit in London & Paris was named « pin-ups vs tough guys » back in 2009. These images are more interesting to me than modern photos. If you look a century back, photography was an event, people stopped their activities and stood still to get their pics taken.

I mix theses old images with very contemporary images from fashion magazines but keep it subtle enough for anybody to notice!

But yes it definitely is a celebration of kitsch that I proudly claim responsibility for!

Can you see yourself working with entirely different imagery?

No! I prefer to stay in my kitsch comfort zone!

I’m kidding, I have been commissioned to reproduce famous paintings with my technique, reinterpreted some of Turner’s work, Caillebote, Picasso and others.

For these I mostly worked with colours and shades, no kitsch faces.

I have also worked with modern stock photos but it’s not my cup of tea to be honest, I find more charm in old photos or drawings.

Your collages are very densely “populated” – what’s your take on minimalism?

It creeps the hell out of me ! If I were a proper collagist I guess it would be part of my everyday work but I like to think of my creations as a full story, like a movie poster that shows all the cool scenes, a world of itself. My goal is to catch the viewer’s eye on one image and then through my storytelling take that eye to another and another image and in the end that eye is stuck looking at my creation for 10 minutes.

It definitely is a reflect of my personality, I have never considered a monochrome piece as Art but admire minimalist artists and their cheekiness as I am incapable of making a big tableau with hardly anything on it.

I sometimes do minimalist stuff, when Im invited to someone’s place I bring a bottle of champagne decorated with a small montage to cover the label. My wife and I make jam in our country house and I decorate the lid of the pots I give away too. But these are destined to the people I give them to, I sign them but do not keep any records of them. So if you want to see my minimalist work, you have to invite me for dinner at your place , or breakfast if you prefer jam!

Nevertheless a lot of my secondary work is minimalist, that’s when I put on my artistic director’s hat: as I am unable to use graphic software, I guide & ask the pros to cut « stencils » in my big tableaux with their digital tools, for example a skull or a butterfly’s silhouette filled with just a detail from a big tableau. I usually make tee-shirts with these stencils and they are interesting as each silhouette has its own life, its own little scene, ideal for tees…. or mugs!

Yet, using a popular photo editing tool, I manage on my own to crop « details tableaux » from my big pictures, and I like these smaller tableaux as they also create new worlds, new stories, certainly clearer and perhaps more readable than my big creations. But softwares & digital tools come in play for all this minimalism, so I consider it lesser work than my true original tape transfer work.

You have travelled a lot and lived in Cambodia for many years. Does this affect your work?

Cambodia is my country of expat birth. I have a strong link with the country as it was before the Khmer Rouge but it doesn’t affect my work at all as I focus more on Americana, (where I also lived as a teen, remember?).

I’m just back in France after living five years in Cambodia where I worked and lived on a tropical island, part of the « Survivor » TV shows production team for a while before landing me a daily thee-hours radio host job.

I went to live there in an attempt to find my roots, dig’em up, dry them and infuse them to see what buzz it would give me… but nothing happened!

Except, I met my soulmate there, got married and decided to come back to Europe to show my wife another world than the third-world tropical dictatorship she always knew.

If it weren’t for her, I’d still be riding my motorcycle everywhere around Southeast Asia with all the troubles that come with such rides...

Did you manage to do a lot of creative work while travelling? Are you one of those people that carry their materials with them wherever they go?

My mom worked as a stewardess in my youth, and our family benefited from very low airline and hotel prices, therefore we travelled everywhere in the world at every school holiday.

I continued travelling as a young adult but always in an immersive approach, stay in the country you visit for at least six months to understand and gain something different from the tourist places.

I find it a more interesting, and sometimes more dangerous way to embrace a new place.

I did collect a lot of material from my travels that I compiled along with travel pics in scrapbooks.

Yet my creative work is never constant, I sometimes work for six months and then nothing for three years. It’s not out of interest or a lack of inspiration, it’s just that life keeps me busy doing other stuff. But my studio is definitely nomadic, everything I need fits in a box that I can throw in the boot of my car and I just need a table and my tape dispenser to get started.

You have a very distinct style and way of working? Do you think it is important to try things you think you’re not good at? Or to stick with what works for you once you found it?

I have done some research to find peer tape transferers but it seems I am one the very few if not the only one to work that way. There are plenty of people working with tape transfer but I have never seen work that resembles mine. It is a strength if I know how to market it well. No pun intended but yes it sticks with me, I have come up with many different techniques to use tape and am always eager to show anyone the simplicity of the trade, but not my secrets!

What are your working on currently?

My last and current collection is named « the devil is in the detail ». A part of it was shown in vintage festivals and in Barbizon, the mecca of realism, out of all places. The second part of this collection is mainly focused on film noir and I have been working on it for the last 4 months.

Do you have any plans for future projects?

I plan to go bigger! Proper gallery exhibits along with decorating full walls of shops, bars and venues.

I’m also working on covering buildings, but don’t want to say too much on that yet!

Francesco Fikesh 
Interview: Petra Zehner

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on September 11, 2020

Could you please introduce yourself? Where did you grow up, and what were some of your first art experiences?

I was born and grew up in Edinburgh (Scotland) in a pretty rough part of the city. As a kid I was completely obsessed with football and in all honesty I showed next to no interest in art at all until I was about 14 or 15 when I became interested in graphic design where I took it upon myself to design one issue of the school newsletter. Even then my experience in anything creative was pretty limited to when I was at school.

A particular memory at secondary school was of me trying to paint – I think I was to design a record cover or something like that - but I just did not know what to do. The frustration was really overwhelming as I knew what I wanted to do and could visualise the end result but did not know where to begin.

It took me a very long time to overcome these frustrations. For so long I thought being artistic meant you had to draw or paint and I felt as if I had to know how to do something before I would even try.

Was collage a medium that spoke to you from the beginning? Or did you try any other art forms first?

I became interested in collage through my interest in photography. I had been working on a personal project called Glasgow in Bits (GIB) where I photographed graffiti, architectural details, just little odds and ends that caught my eye in and around Glasgow.

Anyway, I was working on an ebook for GIB and decided to create a collage for the cover… and that’s it, I’ve been hooked ever since. I still have the original collage for the cover. It’s awful!  And that was only a couple of years ago.

Do you have any formal art training, and if so, what did/does art school do for you artistically, if anything?

I have no formal training in art at all. In my younger days I worked as a graphic designer for a number of newspapers and print houses in Edinburgh. The problem was that I became interested in graphic design through my knowledge of computing and because of that I never saw what I did as being artistic or creative.

Pretty much all my learning has been accumulated through years of YouTube tutorials, reading art books, and just trying stuff out… It’s been a long process.

Would you like to talk a little about the process behind your collages? Do you work exclusively analogue?

I work exclusively in analogue. I just love the tactile nature of working in that way. 

Generally, I don’t plan out my work too much but when I do I usually I begin to think about possible ideas a week before I start. Sometimes I will make notes – single words or a phrases – other times I make some quick sketches or note down particular colours I want to work with. Occasionally, I may need to do some research and think about collecting images, text, whatever for the artwork.  

In contrast, there are definitely times I do no planning at all. For example, when I started working on the Paris Collage Collective weekly challenges I made a deliberate decision to never plan. I just print out the artwork for that week’s challenge and see what happens. So far, they have mostly turned out well.

I watched some of your Instagram live videos. You like to experiment if I’m not mistaken. Could you describe some of your favourite techniques that have resulted from those experiments?

That is what I love most about collage. It is such a great art form for experimentation and embracing new techniques because anything goes.

One of my favourite techniques is to use sand paper to roughen the surface of my collages. You can create some great results but it can be a bit time consuming. I also like to use knives, screwdrivers or chisels to hack bits of out my work. It’s a great way to add texture and bring life to your artwork.

When I am working with paint I often use a credit card or something similar to paint with. The card makes it really easy to spread really thin layers of almost translucent paint on the surface.

What materials and tools do you use, why, and how?

My materials are a pretty basic. I use various mixed media papers, anything around the 300gsm mark. I also like to work on canvas and wood panels.

As far as adhesives go I use either Mod Podge or Liquitex Matte Gel depending on the effect I am looking for. I also have loads of different brushes, acrylic paints, scalpel, steel ruler.

Other than that most of what I use I find at home, second shops, or discount stores.

You have a studio, meaning both space and the liberty to make a mess. Do you have any advice for people who have limited space and materials, and who work in their living space rather than a studio?

Studio is a bit of a push to be honest. It is more of a table that has been squeezed in to my very cramped garage! For a long time I worked at my kitchen table but it was virtually impossible to work without ruining something in the kitchen. I’m a pretty messy worker.

A dedicated space to work makes so much of a difference. I find it difficult to work for prolonged periods of time so being able to go to the garage and try out ideas or continue to work on something at any time is a real bonus. If there is any way your readers can  create a dedicated space they should definitely do it, it opens up so many opportunities. 

There are lots of places you can pick materials cheaply or for free. I always pick up free newspapers or magazines and check them out for ideas. Charity shops are great for old magazines and posters. You can even pick up art, cheap canvases that you can paint over and reuse for you own artwork.

The best piece of advice I can give is to use the creativity you already have when it comes to materials. Collage allows us to reuse resources in different ways. For example, I recently bought an anti-slip mat intended for use under a rug and used it as stencil that I painted over. There are so many things that can be re-used, so we need to keep our eyes open and consider how we can repurpose what we can.

Has your work has changed over the years, and if so how?

The biggest change in my work is that I definitely become more willing to experiment with new materials and techniques. I have definitely become more willing to look at ‘mistakes’ or ‘problems’ as possible new ways of working. I have also began to embrace new materials. For example recently I have begun to work with wood and cardboard in my work.

What are your working on currently? And what professional or artistic goals do you have as an artist?

I recently started a piece that uses photographs of old posters and adverts on the streets.  I love the look that comes when billposters build up over years creating these thick layers of music posters, adverts, graffiti, stickers, etc. It’s like a little time capsule. I really like the idea of something constantly changing and evolving, like you could walk past the same spot every day and it looking subtly different.

And last but not least, who are some of the artists, collage and in general, you admire?

At the moment I am pretty much obsessed with Henri Matisse.  I saw an exhibition of his last year in Sorrento (Italy) when I was on holiday and have been hooked ever since.  His cut-outs are just so beautiful.  I loved the freedom he expresses in his work; the organic shapes and especially his use of colour.

I also love Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock, Paul Nash, Mark Rothko, Keith Haring, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to name just a few… ask me again in a week or two and I’m sure this list will be totally different!

John Hutton IG
Interview: Petra Zehner

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on September 04, 2020

Could you please introduce yourself a little? Where are you from and how and when did you start creating art?

I’m Dominique Barberis, I’m a collage artist and graphic designer from Antwerp, Belgium. I studied Illustration and Graphic Design at St. Lucas school of Arts in Antwerp. Together with my husband I run my own design agency EHBOntwerp.be.

Do you work in any other media other than collage?

I mostly create collage art, but I try to experiment with other materials and media. The colors and shapes in my work have to blend well with each other. Therefore I use extra techniques in my collages to strengthen the whole, like painting, drawing, sewing, typography, … For some time I’ve been making wooden objects, but I also use collage techniques to decorate them. In my professional life I make digital work as a graphic designer, although this may not strictly be art, it still is a creative process.

You work exclusively analog if I’m not mistaken. Have you ever tried working digitally?

This may sound strange, but I started by making digital collages. I had lots of old magazines, but hesitated to take them apart. One day I said to myself ‘F*** it’ and started cutting up the magazines, which was really liberating. Since that day I only make analog collages as an artist. They have a lot more tactility and depth than digital collages, and they are truly unique because I can use each magazine clipping  or book cover only once.

This does not mean I look down on digital work, as a graphic designer I still create digital collages for clients.

How would you describe you work in your own words?

Someone once asked me to describe my work in one sentence. After long and hard thinking, this was my answer: ‘Creating stories by visually talking about emotions.’ I see and feel a story and give it an organic form. Tactile, subtle and purified. Balanced but with a surprising tension. I visually talk about love, joy, farewell, comfort, closeness and freedom ...

I start by removing the old, read out story from the book by tearing out the inner pages. Then I visually create a new story (my own) on the front- and backcover of the book. When I feel the artwork is finished, I try to find a title that makes the viewer think and gives the work a twist by playing with words and double meanings. The most important however is to give everyone the possibility to find their own story in my work. It is very satisfying when someone tells me what they see in one of my works and it is completely different from my own vision. That way the artwork keeps growing, getting more and more meaning. That’s when I know I made a good piece.

What or who are your influences? Are they intellectual? Personal?

I can be influenced by anything, a walk in the forest, a site in the city, a painting, drawing, colour combination, tv show, song, ... I always keep my eyes open for new experiences, feelings and influences.

What is your work process like? Do you start with a specific idea? Or do you let your source material guide you?

I never start with a lined-out idea. For me, the making of the collage is the same as creating the story. Since I am limited to work with the materials I find, I have to start from these. I browse through my magazines, get inspired by an image and then the story of the collage unfolds itself in the process of making it.

I sometimes use an element that returns in different pieces. I created a number of works with such an element, a ‘drop’, which I use in different ways. Sometimes it is painted, sometimes cut out, only used half, …

The titles of my works are also very important, I play with words so they get a double meaning. The titles are a significant part of the artwork.

You work has a rather nostalgic feel to it. Do you have any specific ephemera you are drawn to?

I understand what you mean, but for me the art I make is not nostalgic, it is contemporary, even timeless. But by using old bookcovers and clippings from old magazines, I think my work automatically has a nostalgic feel to it. I don’t specifically try to create this, but I do like this look, though. I never work with materials from modern magazines or books, the old materials I use have a warm and tactile feel, they have a history that becomes part of the story I try to tell with my work.

What are your sources for found images?

I get my materials everywhere I can find them, fleamarkets, recycling parks, library sales, garage sales, second hand websites, ... By now all my friends know I’m always searching for old books, magazines, photo’s, so they keep their eyes open and give me a call when they stumble on some hidden treasure for me.

What’s important to me is that I recycle old materials and give them a new life. I will never work with newly bought materials.

It takes quite a bit of strength to tear books apart. Especially old ones with hard covers. How do you feel when you deconstruct a book?

Tearing books apart is easier than it seems.

In the beginning I felt a bit guilty when I tore up an old book, as if I killed a part of history. But now I feel excited that I can give new life to an old book that probably no one would ever read again and would else end up on a container park or in a box in someone’s basement.

What are your working on currently?

Currently I have cleaned up my workspace and am working on some stuff we’re creating for our graphic design agency. But I will start on some new pieces in a while, since I have two exhibitions by the end of the year.

Any plans for future projects?

See my previous answer, two exhibitions in November and December, feel free to drop in. 

Dominique Barberis web IG
Interview: Petra Zehner

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on June 06, 2020

Could you please introduce yourself a little? Where are you from and how did you start to explore art?

I am a native New Yorker and grew up in a family interested in culture of all types. My sisters and I took painting, music, and dancing lessons. Somewhat ironically, I was considered the least artistic member of the family because I couldn’t draw, meaning that I couldn’t accurately describe reality on paper.  By that definition, I still can’t draw!

Did you have any creative or artistic role models growing up?

Several of my parents’ close friends were visual artists and I often received their work as gifts — I am still surrounded by most of it in my “grown up” home. Plus, my parents collected art on a modest scale. 

So I understood from a young age that being an artist was a special and valued pursuit. My father was also a very avid photographer and an early adopter of Polaroid materials. I fell in love with photography as a child; it was the perfect medium for someone who couldn’t draw. I eventually realized that my artistic strength was that I could “see,” and that I had a sensitivity to aesthetics.

You studied Fine Arts. What made you pursue formal art education, and what did it do for you?

I went to graduate school in art much later in life. Previously, I had gone to law school and was a civil rights attorney for many years. I’ve always loved being a student/learner, and I craved the intensity of an MFA program. It was tough at first, finding my place in a class of grad students much younger than I, but soon enough I felt accepted by, and connected to, my classmates; what we had in common was more significant than the age and experience disparities that separated us. The professors and critiques were enormously valuable in helping me to identify and shape my own path in artmaking.

How would you describe your style in your own words?

Definitely spare, reductive, minimal, and reticent. I work exclusively on paper which, like skin, is fragile and permeable. In a world where a great majority of contemporary work is loud and competing for attention, I value what is otherwise and regret that it is often overlooked. I am interested in how little one can say and still convey meaning.

Did it take you long to develop your own voice? Was there a lot of experimenting involved, or did you always know what works for you?

It took some time to figure out what was most important to me — in terms both of personal values and aesthetics. But being process-oriented and experimenting with a wide range of media and materials played a key role in my development (ongoingly).

How do you think your work has changed over the years?

I spent many years as a fine art photographer and then, when digital overwhelmed analog and many of my cherished materials became scarce, I started exploring painting and drawing. I also wanted more of my hand in making work than was possible with even darkroom photography. But my love of light, and its many qualities and permutations, has been a constant.

Are there any themes, ideas, or messages that you feel are particularly present or significant in your work?

Silence; autonomy vs. affiliation; time; vulnerability; reconciliation; resilience; wounds; rupture and repair.

You have a series called ‘Diary Pages’? What are you trying to express with it? And how long have you been working on it?

The “Diary Pages” have been an ongoing part of my practice for about five years. I think of them as representing fragments of thought, feeling, and sensation. They are provisional and ephemeral: the realization of a moment or the residue of a day. Made on familiar, disposable calendar pages, they juxtapose the orderly passage of time, and our desire for structure and predictability in our lives, with the messy, often random realities that actually characterize our days. This series has probably gotten the biggest response among my bodies of work, maybe because diary pages are accessible and relatable.

What else are you working on currently?

My work almost always has a psychologically undercurrent but, in general, a new series tends to evolve organically. I typically have many pieces in progress, and I move from one to the other based on my mood and insights. No preparatory sketches ever — when I’ve tried that approach, the final work never has the life or energy of the original sketch.

Who are some of the artists you admire?

Eva Hesse, Richard Tuttle, Brice Marden, Louise Bourgeois, James Bishop, Zarina Hashima, Robert Ryman, and Anne Truitt, among many visual artists. I have also been influenced by writers, including Lydia Davis, Samuel Beckett, and Edward Albee.

Rita Bernstein web IG
Interview: Petra Zehner

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on May 17, 2020

Could you please introduce yourself a little? Where did you grow up, and what were some of your first art experiences?

I was born in South London but moved to a village in semi-rural Kent when I was two. I loved it because I grew up within reach of fields and animals and roamed around in a daydream.

All I remember is having an urge to draw and make things. Maybe from as young as five I loved all forms of creativity, especially music, but drawing was the easiest to pursue on my own. I don’t come from an openly artistic family so the secretive, individualism of it suited me. I do remember making a drawn book of animals, which I copied (almost page for page) from an existing animal book. I still have the original book but not the one I made. I was overly proud of my drawings and a miniature stapler that I used to staple the book together, not with one staple but a fresh one each time I added a page. It was heavy and immensely ugly.

On your website you say that you are an artist, writer, and illustrator. In that order?

The order of the three, which could also include filmmaking (but I left that off in an attempt to look sane and focused!), is ever fluid and one day I am hoping that I will no longer see it as a dilemma.

I suspect it is due to my ever shifting source of limited finances. I know it is an artist cliché but meaningful financial survival is a difficulty – without filling up ten pages about what that difficulty consists of – it means that when finances are shaky creativity waxes and wanes with it. I know quite a few people who are in the same boat and struggle in and out of different roles too. I’ve resisted certain things like full-time lecturing, for which I am qualified, so I’m aware that the choices are mine and the dilemma is of my own making. It’s always a balancing act, which I am sure has sometimes lead to wrong choices and missed opportunities.

Having said that and in an attempt to answer your question, ‘artist’ covers a lot of ground. I come from a very working class background where artists are other people so for me to claim that title is quite important.

‘Writing’ is something I have done every day for fifteen years. I am published in a small way, so far, and have written one novel (that could be rejected any day!) and am currently writing another. I once studied for two years on a screenwriting MA, and last year was awarded the HW Fisher Curtis Brown Creative writing scholarship. Fully fledged writer feels like a long road, especially at the moment, but that sort of life would suit me.

‘Illustrator’ involves all of my art education and training. I ended up with an MA from Central Saint Martins and I still have an active freelance illustration practice. Looking back the choice to study illustration now seems arbitrary and more to do with a lack of guidance around earning a living as a creative person; ironically I have not sustained a level of success at either!

How do these different media and forms of expression relate, correspond and inform each other?

How they relate is also ever changing, and I’m really sorry to go on about money – rather lack of it – but if I have earned money from illustration I feel free to write and the freer I feel the more inclined I am to make art. I don’t think that art and money have any positive relationship whatsoever, yet obviously one needs money. It’s so complicated. Money generally messes things up for me where art is concerned so to get anywhere I cannot think about money when I make art. I wish I had a better or deeper answer to that.

Working in different media, do you find that you express different sides of yourself in each medium, or is there an underlying theme that connects them all?

Being such different forms of expression, the short answer is definitely yes. As an artist I could become totally concerned with visual relationships of shape and marks but then my concerns as a writer are complex so inevitably they meet, or clash, all the time. It is usually to do with audience, words, communication. I’m dissatisfied if I end up with an ‘untitled’ piece; I like to uncover something about intention or unconscious actions – there’s always something going on.

I definitely visit the same themes in my writing and sometimes they have poked through in my art and I’ve ended up with a whole body of work (I once did a project called Charity Shop Orphans where I collected nearly 200 animal ornaments from charity shops, painted and renamed them into new families). I like discarded, apparently valueless objects and qualities that suddenly become valuable. I’m intrigued by what value means, interested in what family means, and a big one for me is freedom. What constitutes freedom and where it is to be found is always cropping up in my work.

Could you describe your creative process? How do you go from an idea to a finished piece of art?

I see creativity as the key attribute for survival, mentally and otherwise. I have this idea (possibly obscene, given the current situation for those in the most extreme circumstances) that if I were put in a room with nothing I would still fashion something, make some gestural communicative thing. I’m not sure that describes my creative process but I think there is an inherent freedom in that idea, that I could literally make anything and it could exist, even if only in imagination.

To answer more sensibly, if I try to plan something it usually goes wrong – really wrong! Even if I decide, I am going to stick this piece of collage here, it never feels wrong or contrary if as I approach the paper I stick it somewhere completely different! Even if it does turn out wrong, I just adapt it. With painting I don’t feel right until I have gone completely wrong and can begin the process of teasing out something approximate to my intention. I find that exciting, which is essential for me.

Along the same theme I’ve been working collaboratively with an artist friend for over two years. On a pre-arranged date we both meet and exchange a piece of work. We’ve worked with different themes but rejected most of them and all the parameters we’ve attempted to set, and have no idea where it is going. It’s immense fun and in the true spirit of playfulness – this probably describes my creative process quite accurately.

How would you describe your style in three words?

Driven by excitement.

Do you think there is a division between your, I would guess more commercial, illustration work and your personal art practice?

These questions are so amazingly good – they’re making my brain hurt, which I love!

The division is so deep, or at least has in the past been so pronounced, it is unhealthy. A couple of years ago I attempted to heal the rift by going back to 100% analogue illustration, with the aim of not using a computer (and all its limited visual scale and arranged swatches of colour). I would use my drawing skills and only compile a digital collage to make the actual illustration. It sort of worked, I’m getting there. Just need to fully convince the commissioners!

If I am honest I would like to let my most commercial sides go and become a full-time artist, and writer, but it is impossible without more financial security, and it’s hard to let the things go that could still potentially earn money. This is a real dilemma that secure people don’t ever get – the choice is always sacrificial in some way, always about compromise that does battle with your particular psychology.

Who are your major influences?

This is hard! There are so many influences, I guess you want the positive ones!

I’ve never been lucky enough to have a mentor and I don’t really latch onto people in that way, or have been too afraid to ask! I admire many artists, people as diverse as Amy Sillman, Antoni Tapies, David Bomberg, Cy Twombly... but I think my major influences probably come from writers or sometimes filmmakers. I listen to a lot of music and love jazz, old and new – absolutely relate to the drive that jazz musicians have to improvise as an essential part of their creative process. I love the Irish writer Anne Enright (what a sound woman) and Chekhov and Nabakov. Films like Network, Being There, Chance or Coincidence, are ones I watched a lot (but that’s the tip of the iceberg). I’m a re-reader and re-watcher of things to the point of saturation as that’s one of the ways I learn and relate, which tells me I am hugely influenced by other peoples’ work – a thing I’ve always been wary of in case I attempt to imitate them.

Maybe it’s the small things that my mind refuses to part with that end up influencing the most? A wonderful drawing tutor called Tony Corner was the first person who stuck his neck out and made me see that I had some viable ability and artistic intelligence; receiving many many rejections has had a profound influence in terms of testing my commitment to all that I do; the people at Curtis Brown Creative awarding me a scholarship has had an enormous impact.

Believe it or not, I actually might be more interested in the negative ones...

With regard to negative influences the most useful thing I have learnt is to do with identifying, or at least trying to bring to light what is behind the behaviour that has got under my skin. I don't think it's possible to stop the negative influence from getting in -- I like most artists have a pretty permeable layer between me and the world, and no one is immune despite how it might look -- but these days I refrain from giving certain negative people credence. Once I've got the full picture I can shift my efforts in a better direction, and if I can't change things immediately I can at least stop wasting energy on those particular negative people or situations.

You occasionally participate in our collage challenge. Is collage a technique you use often?

Yes, my current illustration portfolio is digital collage and all the material is generated by drawing. It’s a nice way of working as I can combine my different drawing styles and be quite experimental. I also love working in an analogue way and make quite a lot of personal work that I don’t often show using mixed media and collage. Here I will use anything or be inspired by found or ephemeral things.

What about collage speaks to you?

I love the chance of cutting out a shape and seeing the negative, unexpected piece in the other hand is better and using that; or suddenly seeing the value of found marks on a scrap of paper; or finding something in the street - before lockdown I made it my habit to pick up anything interesting, a recent one being a handwritten page by a small child that had such a bold quality, I would not have been able to create that myself.

I also love the natural layering system of analogue collage, which used with mixed media can be hugely sophisticated and subtle in aesthetics and communication.


Emma Harding web IG
Interview: Petra Zehner

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on May 08, 2020

Could you please introduce yourself a little? Where are you from and how did you start to explore art?

I was born and lived for twenty years in the south of Poland, but moved to Bristol, England, ten years ago. Unfortunately no one in my family is interested in art. There wasn't any space for any art in my childhood. Probably that's why I'm actually so curious about creating new things. I took my first picture nine years ago, after buying an old film camera at a car boot sales. I wanted to capture our trips around Europe. Then, three years ago, I moved to Kendal, near The Lake District, with my husband and our daughter, where I gave myself even more permission to create. I discovered the collage and animation world three years ago. I'm self-taught and constantly learning.

You do both photography and collage. What, if any, came first?

That's right. I do analogue animations too, but photography was first. It became this incredible companion in good and bad times. It went hand in hand with my daily life and very often I used it as a sort of therapy.

How would you describe your style in your own words?

Just natural.

Your work has a very analog feel to it. Was that an aesthetic, a practical or a philosophical choice?

It all came very natural. Thanks to my first analogue camera and artists that I admire. I like the physically feeling of cutting and gluing. Luckily, I found old ephemera in my family home. I like the feeling of the past and working with paper that took on a life of its own and used to belong to my family.

You create a lot of self-portraits. Does identity play a big role in your work?

Every single photograph is our self-portrait. My art is made of NOW.

It’s comes from the present moment and from the present feelings, but my goal, as an artist, is to leave everything undefined, including myself. I leave a big space for creations too.

How does living in the UK affect your work?

Completely. First of all, it all started in England. For the first few years, after moving to Bristol, my focus shifted primarily to photography and then, somewhat accidentally, I discovered a new land - collages and animations.

Who or what are your majors influences?

I have always been very influenced by silent films and early photographs.

From where do you draw inspiration?

It changes. From everything my senses can feel. Right now the light inspires me the most. I began to focus of the landscape. The glimpse of light in deep darkness. The street lamps in my neighbourhood. I started walking at night, with my camera. Being alone in darkness sharpens my senses. Light is infinite.

Jana Sojka web IG + IG
interview: Petra Zehner

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on May 01, 2020

Could you please introduce yourself a little? Where did you grow up and how did you become interested in art?

My name is Laurence Briat. I was lucky enough to grow up in the south of France, near the Mediterranean Sea. I never wanted to leave this region and its beautiful light, and I still live there.

My interest in art dates back to the "seventies", when I started studying at the Beaux-Arts (university) in Marseille, which I stopped after three years. It was a time of a lot of influences, and it took time to find my way. In retrospect, I think that it is mainly books and encounters with artist friends that have always fuelled my interest in art and in the plastic arts in particular. It's a passion that leads to long periods of seclusion in the studio, and I savour them, but I also like to share it, especially when I run workshops.

What ignited your interest in collage work in particular?

Collage satisfies my taste for the fragmented, mixtures, blends, reclaiming, recycling... I am fascinated by the unpredictable construction of images, amazed by what is often born of disorder, of chance. I like its spontaneous, recreational side. It’s a vast area of freedom that has become essential to me. It's my favourite game!

The abundance of usable elements available is for me a source of infinite inspiration.

Do you make any other kind of art?

I have been interested in many areas of the visual arts.

I have practiced forms as diverse as Chinese calligraphy, nude drawing, painting on large formats, and multiple engraving techniques. I have never managed to choose or focus on a single one, and I remain engaged simultaneously, and in cycles, in a certain number of mediums. My different practices feed on each other. At the moment I am working on photogravure based on my photomontages. This work is close to the creative process of collage.

How would you describe your work and style in your own words?

My work always tells the same story: a story of humans, of fragile presences. It is about disappearance, the passage of time, memory, uncertainty ... all these subjects are at the heart of my concerns. I try to treat them with distance, grace and sometimes irony.

It is daily, impulsive, compulsive work.

My approach is intuitive, and I let myself be guided by curiosity. I always like to find new forms for my collages. This leads me to all kinds of experiments, like mixing analog and digital, including pieces of paintings or engravings, etc.

My artistic signature is marked by rigorous cropping, cuts, interruptions, gaps. These segmented images respond to a desire for simplification. I always try to express more with less.

I love the way you use colour in your work. Minimal but bold. How did this way of working develop?

Through the practice of painting I have no doubt developed a personal idea of colour. It is true that I attach great importance to it but also to light. I often contrast the faded tones of the papers I use with very bright colours.

Do you choose colour intuitively or more consciously?

I go towards what attracts me. I think I intuitively choose colour according to the feelings that emerges from the images. I am always attentive to contrasts, for example between the softness of colours and the radical and violent cuts in an image.

How do you feel when you deconstruct a book?

I have this urge to destroy, to tear apart ... a kind of transgression ... but I only use abandoned, discarded papers, and only to rebuild.

What I especially like about collage is giving new meaning and new life to something obsolete, residual, saving it from destruction... at least for a while.

Do you feel responsible for the images you work with or create? How you dismantle figures and rearrange bodies or faces?

At the beginning I work without preconceived idea, I leave everything to the unconscious. Later I of course look at what the image I have in front of me expresses, and take responsibility for it. I have to own the meaning that emerges from it. However, the construction of my images does not impose only one reading because I only give partial visions, primers of narration. I am frequently surprised when people tell me about their own interpretations, which are often influenced by their own intimate memories. From that point on, my responsibility diminishes.

I went through a lot of your work, and even though there is a lot of older imagery, you also work with contemporary material. Do you have any preference? How do you choose the imagery you work with?

From my first collages on, I used discarded paper, old handwritten letters, images from old magazines, old amateurs photos. Vintage elements attract me for the quality of their material, their texture, their alterations, and the particular feeling they give off.

Later on, my sources widened more and more. Today I use whatever I like and come across: I like to bring disparate elements together, to create tension.

What interests me most is to play with temporality by mixing fragments from different eras in the same collage. Thus past and present collide and merge and this creates questions and ambiguities. So putting a contemporary element onto an old photograph, I love that!

Your collages feature predominantly female characters. Would you consider yourself a feminist artist?

It's true that femininity is dominant in my collages, and that the masculine appears only on the side... However, I do not consider myself a feminist artist, although I am absolutely in solidarity with the women's movement.

Who are some of your favourite collage artists?

The pioneers of course, Kurt Schwitters, Rauschenberg, Richard Hamilton, poster artists like Jacques Villeglé. So many others… the sensitive collages of Katrien de Blauwer.

But if I had to name just one, it would be John Stezaker. I was shocked when I discovered him! It was from this moment on that I dared to cut images radically. He opened this path for me, showed me another way of relating to images, gave me the audacity to appropriate them and really changed my gaze. His images are so powerful... and on top of that I really like the aesthetics of the fifties!

My recent presence on Instagram has already made me discover talented collagists whose work interests me a lot. But I have so many favourites that I can't name them for fear of forgetting half of them.

Laurence Briat web IG
interview Petra Zehner

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on April 25, 2020

Could you please introduce yourself a little? Where are you from, and what is your general background?

My name is Emily Geirnaert, I was born in Paris to an Irish mother and a French father. I grew up in the southern suburbs of Paris, surrounded by this dual culture. Today I still live in Paris, a city that I hold dear in my heart for its culture, its architecture, its secrets and its diversity. At the end of my baccalaureate, I studied arts with a focus on interior design at Penninghen (Paris) for five years.

I know you are an interior designer. Do you have any other art or design training?

Yes I am an interior designer, but I mainly do scenography. I work for theatres, television, advertising and other events.

I only have formal training in interior design. When it comes to scenography, everything happens through meetings, experience, and learning by doing. Today, to the great dreamer that I am, it brings a lot of joy to be able to live from this profession, this ephemeral art, and its infinite possibilities of expression.

You started a collage project called “Les collages poétiques” in 2018. Was that your first encounter with collage as a technique?

My "collages poétiques" project is not my first experience with collage. I used it when I was much younger but not at all in the same spirit as today. At the time, I worked with fragments of torn, crumpled, coloured magazines that I juxtaposed to recreate portraits of the people around me.

It is surprising to see that today I use the opposite of this technique since the scalpel is my main tool and it is rare to see a face appear in my collages.

What about collage as an art form speaks to you?

Collage as an art in its own right attracted me for its infinite possibilities but also for the chance to deconstruct and recreate things in my own way. When I started posting my daily collages on Instagram, I quickly discovered this fascinating and creative world of collage artists. It’s incredible that a real community spreads all over the world, and that we each have our own techniques, our modes of expression, a great admiration for some, and in these times of confinement a real solidarity, it’s beautiful.

How do you go about transforming an idea into a physical collage?

I have been keeping this book open for two years now, because it is above all a diary, sometimes intimate, sometimes focused, of this strange and questionable world in which we live. There is a kind of psychoanalytic work in my collages, I cut, I glue, I express myself, I laugh, I cry, I doubt, I wonder... in short I live and above all let my unconscious speak.

So obviously, on some days I have a real desire and need to express a feeling, and my collage will be very much planned and constructed in my mind, and then on other days I will be faced with doubt, and without forcing anything I leave room for chance, taking whatever result I get for an answer.

You’re a minimalist. Is that a purely aesthetic or more philosophical choice?

I am a minimalist, and at home it really is a true philosophy of life. It doesn't take much to make me happy or sad, so I'm not cheating. I remain faithful to the famous phrase of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: "less is more".

I also apply it in my creative process. I play with empty space, black and white, and recently I started to go even further by limiting myself to create my collages from two or three elements maximum.

How would you describe your style in your own words?

Oh, this question is very complicated for me, so I will continue to call them "les collages poétiques".

From where do you draw inspiration?

I realize with hindsight that the artist who most inspired and guided me in my artistic choices is the photographer Rodney Smith.

I also find inspiration in everyday life, during my walks, in nature, when I read, in exchanges with my friends, my teenage sons, long contemplations, love ... In the evenings, when I'm finally alone, I listen to music, always, think about my day, and give in to a bit of reverie, which brings me into the process of creation, into my imaginary world.

You started your collage series in 2018. Have you noticed your work evolve and change during that time, and if so how?

Recently I have started to look at my early collages again, and I laughed a lot! Obviously there has been a real evolution, and I hope it will continue. Two years ago I groped around, I explored, things were more cluttered and I was looking for my real voice.

Over time, my technique has become more refined, and my choices have become more deliberate. I like to take risks, and even when I fail, I accept it, I learn from it, and I try again.

Any lessons learned you care to share?

As I said earlier, yes, I learn something every day, but these are personal reflection.

I don’t like giving lessons. People are free to express what they want, especially when they create. I myself prefer to pass on techniques, after that, everyone has their own style, prism, desires...

Do you have any plans for future projects?

For the moment and with what is happening to us all around in the world I have no plans but rather a real wish, that for a better, more respectful, more just world. And to continue to create. That’s vital for me!

That said, good luck to everyone, and take good care of yourself.

Emily Geirnaert web IG
interview Petra Zehner

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on April 15, 2020

Could you please introduce yourself a little?

I'm Philipp Eichhorn alias 13MIXEDMODES, 37, born in Thuringia. I live and work near Basel in the beautiful border are of France, Switzerland and Germany.

The pseudonym "13MIXEDMODES" comes from my grandfather's amateur radio. (The mixed mode enables switching between analogue radio & digital radio)

How long have you been creating art? Do you do other things besides collages?

I have been creating art in the form of collages since 2014. I also like to take photographs.

How would you describe your style in your own words?

I experiment with ironic and often unrecognizable images, but also with clear structures and elements. My work is the investigation of unexpected representations that result from the combination of fragmented materials through collage. I love playing with contrasts and colours. I always push my collages as far as I can so that they “flash” me in a certain way.

On your website you say that a lot of your work was created in connection with electronic music. Can you elaborate on that?

I grew up with techno at the end of the 90s, and have been in love with electronic music ever since. Whenever I work in my studio, various sets of elctro usually run in the background, which gives me a special input.

Digital or analog?

Only analog!

I really like how you use colour and contrast. Is that a conscious choice? Or a result of the materials that are available to you? Which of course is a choice in itself...

Colours and contrasts are some of my specialities. These attributes in certain combinations are what satisfies me the most. So yes, it is a conscious choice.

Would you describe yourself as a generally nostalgic person, or is your preference for old photos a purely aesthetic preference?

Both. First and foremost, I prefer materials, i.e. papers, from the 50s to 70s because they are very robust, do not shine, and have great properties when used with glue. I also like the colours from that time. Those old colours are hard to find in modern materials. Today’s paper is no longer real paper. It immediately curls when it comes into contact with glue. Therefore I choose older paper very consciously, mostly if not entirely for technical reasons. Of course it is also fun as someone who is interested in history to preserve those papers from the past (with all their imprints, motifs, etc.) and to use them to capture and express your own time.

Many of your works are relatively minimalistic and consist of only a few elements. This way of working can be more difficult than using a large number of components. How long do you work on average on a collage? Or are you working on several at the same time?

Yes, I sometimes choose a minimalist approach, but sometimes my work is overloaded. Depends on my mood. There are collages that are done in 20 minutes. Others in two hours. And some I work on only sporadically. I keep them around, and little by little I add something, or correct what I already have. Sometimes I work on only one collage, sometimes it’s several at the same time.

Do you have any new projects that you are currently working on? Plans or wishes for the future?

I always start new projects or take part in collaborations with other artists. I like to experiment with different formats etc.

Otherwise, I just allow myself to work without focusing on precise goals. After all, I have a regular job that pays the bills. Art is not always my top priority.

That said, I would like to have an exhibition at some point.

Philipp Eichhorn web IG
interview: Petra Zehner

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on April 08, 2020

Could you please introduce yourself? Where did you grow up, and what were some of your first art experiences?

My name is Louis Bowes, I was born and grew up in a seaside town in North East England, just outside of Newcastle where I still live today. My early most memorable experiences of art would be listening to Bruce Springsteen CDs whilst on journeys in my parents’ car. I remember having a very visual response to the things he was singing about. Vivid lines such as “...I work down at the car wash where all it ever does is rain” really stuck with me. I was very young at the time and in my mind he was singing about the world around me, I had no reason to believe it wasn’t the car wash down the road from me. I guess it’s that childlike nature before our worlds become divided into different concepts and we attach labels, this country and that, those people and us. They were just words and melodies that painted the mundane around me into something interesting and beautiful. I had the artistic bug inside of me from very early on and it’s never gone away.

Do you work in any media other than collage?

I love photography too, at the moment I’m enjoying using a 35mm point and shoot film camera, I like the simplicity of it. Street photography is a big love of mine, with a strong focus on architecture and seeking out interesting people in and around nearby towns and cities. Images I make very often find their way into my collages too, it’s one of my primary source materials.

Your work is very pure and minimal. How would you describe your style and your collages in your own words?

Pure is a nice word I think, the process certainly feels that way to me. Mostly I’m just trying to make sense of the complex world around us. Most of us live in cities now which are like an overload of visual information, especially places in Europe such as the UK and France, where it’s not uncommon to see a brand new, modern apartment block across the road from a 1960s Brutalist building, right by a 1800s building. Collage allows me, in my own way, to make sense of how these all come together and how people interact with them. Scale, space, proportion, perspective & texture are all important repeating motifs in my work.

What attracts or doesn’t attract you to certain pictures or visual elements?

I love isolated figures within a scene. There’s a painter from Brighton in England called Anne Magill, her paintings are staggeringly good in my opinion. I like images which attempt to portray the depth of the human experience, and I particularly like it when artists try to find interesting ways to do so. Usually it’s the more ordinary things I’m drawn too, there’s a lot of collage artwork out there that has a very colourful, surrealist element to it - where they’re creating full scenes with a very obvious foreground, middle ground & background, they’re good too, but for me it’s simplicity that does it. Elements within space, rather than trying to be too detailed.

What are your sources for found images?

Mostly I use my own photography, the way I like to create collages is to not rely too heavily on a particular element, rather I prefer to use small fragments, a wall, a person walking, a window, a flower, a bird and begin to construct something new. I often use sites like Pexels & Unsplash or dig through public domain archives for hours to find the right pieces.

You work both analog and digitally. What are some of your favourite digital and non-digital collage methods?

I really like the textures you can find in analog materials. I have a library of scanned pieces of paper with interesting textures and imperfections, I tend to use these as the base surface on the digital art-board, and once I’ve created the collage I will use the textured surface again blended on top to bring a sense of cohesion to the elements as they’re oftentimes from different cameras/sources.

Are there any artists or personalities who particularly influenced you?

I really like the work of Peter De Potter, the Belgian artist, his images have a wonderful sense of being and emotion. My favourite artists however are the Soviet Avant-Gardists, El Lissitzky, Gustav Klutsis, and the likes. During the day I work as a graphic designer similar to Lissitzky, but in my mind I’m an architect that never was, and I get to fulfil that via my collages, without any worry that somebody might have to figure out how to build it! I think that was his approach to his work too, outside of the political implications.

What is your outlook on creation and creativity?

For me it’s always been “if somebody else likes it, then that’s a bonus”. I do it as a form of mindfulness in many ways, to get into that state of ’flow’. To step away from the busy days of emails, deadlines, meetings, this task and that - and just focus on one thing. It’s that artistic bug that won’t go away, I do it because something in me compels me to.

What originally drew you to collage?

I remember at about 17 years old I got really into this band WU LYF. Their artwork was often collages evoking a feeling of an uprising or a revolution, a new utopia, a dissent against modernity and capitalism. I think after I heard their music and seen their artwork, I was never the same person again. Design & art became something I knew I was going to do for the rest of my life.

How do you think your work is perceived?

It’s hard to say, I’ve had a lot of wonderful feedback over the years, yet I’m still always genuinely surprised to hear what people have to say. Often people are telling me things I didn’t realise myself about my work. I guess it’s due to my method of doing it because I’m compelled to, not necessarily to portray some sort of narrative or grand idea.

With your work being as minimal as it is, it is hard for me to picture the person behind it. Harder than for some other artists I spoke to. Does your personal life play a meaningful role in you work or its narratives, and if so, how? 

I think it probably does play an unconscious role in the things I make. It’s probably inevitable to a degree. I never really start off trying to express anything personal, but I recognise my works often have isolated figures in them, usually small in scale relative to the other elements. I think it’s probably a feeling lots of people get, that underlying feeling of being a little bit lost, trying to find meaning in a world which can sometimes feel quite cold. Although my general outlook on the world is not a bleak one - I’m a long-term optimist I’d say!

Louis Bowes: web IG
interview: Petra Zehner

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on April 01, 2020

Could you please introduce yourself? Where are you from and how did you start to explore art?

I’m from Westhampton Beach, New York. In college I was doing collage work and Joseph Cornell was the subject of my art history thesis. Following graduation my mom said “I know his sister. She lives in our town. Would you like to meet her?” I said, “Oh, my god! Yes!” Afterwards, I worked cataloguing the Cornell source materials that were sent to the Smithsonian and are now at the Joseph Cornell Study Centre. That was the most amazing, synchronistic thing that’s ever happened to me.

When did you start collaging?

In college, creating collage was a refuge from what were, for me, stressful assignments and critiques. Feminist art was pretty new and not really inclusive of small, intimate stuff I was called to create. So, like so many people, I graduated feeling like I wasn’t a good artist. It took me many years to figure out I just didn’t fit that anachronistic mould. I returned to collaging when my son graduated from college. I started one of those 100-day projects and it was a truly transformational experience. I learned that I could be creative no matter what the hell was going on. In fact, “what the hell was going on” not only informed my work, I found that putting it down on paper helped me cope and grow. It was a burden all those years to have my creativity stuck in my head with no outlet. Now I work nearly every day. Sometimes I cheat a bit and make two or three collages in one day if I need a day off.

Do you work in any other media?

I sometimes make jewellery from found objects and repurposed textiles in the same theme as my collages. I love using old stuff.

Your work has a distinctive vintage feel to it. How would you describe your work in your own words?

My source materials are entirely vintage magazines. I’m obsessed with the colours, the print quality and the images. I’m pretty sure I dream in these colours, maybe I always have. I feel I bring a unique understanding of these materials because they were printed and sold during my lifetime. Recently my creative process has been a way to begin healing from a traumatic loss. The process of moving paper around is profoundly meaningful. Do other people see my work that way? I don’t think so and I’m glad because that could be a real bummer at times. I hope viewers get the raw, immediate honesty, though - a kind of Cartier-Bresson “decisive moment” thing, but the moment is internal not external. Composing my titles is a crucial step in sealing the practice; it’s always an, “Ah ha!” moment.

You have a collage series called “Imaginary Places” influenced by childhood memories? Would you call yourself a nostalgic person?

They say life imitates art - or maybe it’s vice versa in my case. I live in the never-remodelled 1950s house I grew up in. It’s filled with vintage yard sale finds, so it’s just one big nostalgia trip in terms of inspiration, colour, pattern, and design. My work, though, is about what’s going on at the moment I’m creating. I complete every collage in one sitting; for me it’s a more authentic way to work as I don’t want my graphic design-trained brain to start calling the shots. Getting caught up in how a collage looks formally, for me, diminishes the meaning.

Which other themes, ideas, or messages do you feel are particularly present or significant in your work?

Relationships between men and women have been a consistent theme as is the concept of domesticity. In part, I’m trying to make sense of my own life but I’m also influenced by the overtly sexist messages in the vintage magazines while I’m tearing them up (sometimes gleefully). When I was young, I was perplexed by ads like “Modess Because” or “I dreamed I was a bullfighter in my Maidenform Bra” and especially the ads for “married women” selling feminine hygiene products.  I think our culture has made real progress in terms of body shaming women, yet there is so much that hasn’t changed in terms of relationships between men and women, at least speaking for myself.

For as long as I can remember I incorporated images in my work to tell a story that was very open to interpretation. My beautiful, bad-ass muse died very recently and I’m finding I’m drawn to working abstractly and incorporating painting. I feel that these works are currently more emotionally accurate than my image based work.

What is your creative process like? Do you start with a precise idea, or do you let the work take you where it wants to?

I totally go with the flow, wherever that takes me. My work table and process is so not instagramable! I have a big pile of torn out magazine pages in various states of scavenging and shoe boxes with smaller scraps. My creativity thrives in chaos and the chance visual conversations among my scraps. I move my scraps around until they express something, often something surprising. I don’t start gluing until they make their peace with each other. I’m terrible at working on a theme or working from a prompt or specific image. In five minutes I’ve totally moved on.

Do you ever work with contemporary images or materials?

I only use contemporary materials if I’m doing a live collaboration or a class. It’s fun to use materials I am not drawn to with other people; it’s more of an adventure that way. In general, though, contemporary materials don’t align with the colour schemes or images in my brain.

How do you know a piece is finished?

That’s easy. I listen, it tells me.

Who are some of the artists you admire?

I love outsider art. Eva Hesse. Of course, Joseph Cornell, always. Street art and graffiti. I love textiles, Gee’s Bend Quilts. And fashion: Alexander McQueen. Gary Winogrand Color at the Brooklyn Museum was luscious. So was the Color Riot Native American textile show at the Heard Museum.

You do a lot of collaborations? Can you tell us a little bit about the people you worked with and what these collaborations mean to you?

Community and collaboration are guiding principles for me in general - not just for art. Most of my close friends are either from my activist community, dog rescue community, or art community. I’ve met all the people I collaborate with through the Instagram collage community. Through my involvement in @CollageClub, I got involved in @The CollageGardenNYC. Our team met in person and eventually formed a NYC collage collective, Collage Ensemble. I’m putting together an international traveling show with @katjuskart in Finland. I’d never met @cutpasteface and @jklinedinstcollage in person before we went to the New York Public Library, dumped our source materials on the table, started collaborating, and really clicked. Luckily we didn’t get thrown out of the library! Shout out to my newest collage collaborator @MishapsIncluded.

You teach art, to both children and adults. Do you think formal art education is important?

I can only speak for myself. I failed art every year in high school - on purpose. My teacher was crap and I made it my mission to do exactly the opposite of what he said. It was my fun little way of protesting. I did much better work than if I had followed his lesson plan. The most useful aspect of my formal art education was learning art history, discovering the really good stuff. Of course, back then, the focus was on art made largely by men; that was the art that made it into books and museums. It seemed obvious to me to question that.

What’s the main difference between teaching art to children and teaching it to adults?

I don’t see myself as a teacher, I’m a collaborator. I think of myself as a rebellious cheerleader sort of person. I find that kids are less attached, in general, to the outcome. If we have fun, learn something about the materials, and connect, it’s a good day. I come up with all kinds of experiments in my studio that I don’t post on Instagram but they definitely help move me forward. Adults tend to be more afraid of failure so I endeavour to give them permission to enjoy totally screwing up. I think that’s where the best stuff comes from.

What is the hardest challenge for you being an artist?

Most of my work fits on my scanner. I’d love to work really large, but that’s technically challenging because I so love those original vintage magazine colours and images. And I want to keep it minimal.

Patti Robinson web IG
interview: Petra Zehner

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on March 18, 2020

Could you please give us a brief history of where you grew up and how you got started as an artist?

I grew up in NYC right across the park from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My parents dragged me there as a child. I can clearly remember my first Monet retrospective when I was about ten and how amazed I was by it. In high school, we had few resources or perhaps the school didn’t value art education. So, our art teacher made us endlessly draw a house plant, its negative spaces etc. There was a whole movement in school to kill the plant so that we could stop drawing it.

I have always done something creative. I grew up writing poetry as a hobby. I did ceramics at university, when I was working in Tokyo as an English teacher and even when I moved to London. But in 2000, for my 34th birthday, I asked for paints and a canvas and a few hours for myself (I had my four children by then) and I painted a picture. Six months later, I took it off my wall and painted over it. Soon after that I decided to start taking painting classes.

Do you work in any other media than collage?

I began my practice as an oil painter. I adored oil paints for their versatility, their forgiveness. But I was worried about the effect of the fumes of the paint and turps on my family, so I made a radical switch to acrylics. I have also been studying and practicing printmaking for the past nine years.

What ignited your interest in collage work in particular?

I took a week of classes with the English artist Kitty Stirling where she introduced me to acrylic inks. I fell in love with them. They are expensive if you use them with all their intensity of colour. But you can dilute them very effectively too. I started making washy landscapes and seascapes on large rolls of primed wallpaper liner. But I felt something was missing. When I had been oil painting, I mostly painted portraits of people, swans and animals. I’ve always been drawn to figures. So, I started making little paper people and set them into a variety of situations. With these collages, I explored adult life filled with difficult conversations. I made many collages that depicted moments before or after rows or resolutions between people. I also made red London double decker buses, black London taxis and red urban pillar boxes and collaged them into non-urban landscapes where they looked out of place. Taxis took people to discuss secretive things. Buses rescued stranded city folk. Would anyone ever pick up the post?

Then I decided that I wanted to try traditional collage from found materials. I’m a hoarder and it suited me so well. I also had many unsuccessful or incomplete prints printed on high quality paper. So, I have used them as a great base for collage.

You are currently crowd-funding a collage Haggadah on Kickstarter. Could you first please explain what the Haggadah is?

The Haggadah is a written guide to the Passover seder dinner that Jewish people and their friends and families hold each spring. It commemorates the biblical story of the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt. The Haggadah includes various prayers, blessings, rituals, fables, songs and information for how the seder should be enacted. Although modern Haggadot (the plural of Haggadah) can vary widely, the tradition of reading a book to guide the seder dates back to the Middle Ages, and some of the elements that make up contemporary Haggadot were used 2,000 years ago.

So you are creating your own illustrated version of the Haggadah. Why this particular book?

I grew up in a religious home. Although I am no longer orthodox, I love the Jewish festivals and I have great untapped knowledge from my years in parochial schools. A Haggadah is the most commonly decorated Jewish book, so the tradition is a long one. There are many examples of Haggadot starting from around the year 1300 AD in Venice. I wanted to participate in this centuries-old tradition.

The difference with traditional Haggadah pictures is that they usually depict exactly what happened -- the crossing of the red sea, images of slavery, etc. People try to get as close to what they think it looked like as possible, but I think this can sometimes isolate us from connections with the pictures (seeing it all so long ago, weird clothes etc.) The opportunity with collage is to bring the pictures into confluence with contemporary life, with photographs, 19th century etchings, words, illustrations, etc. I think this combination of different styles helps to seamlessly mix together the meaning and literary symbols of the text with the imagination and the visual context. One example is the plagues happening “with an arm outstretched.” Is it literal, or what does it mean? In my collage, I combined the concept of God’s hand with the figurative meaning of wrath. 

You have a rather feminist approach to your Haggadah. Would you mind elaborating a little on that?

I translated the text and eliminated all male references to god.

As for the collages, I would say that my most obviously feminist collage is in the depiction of the “Four Children” which is widely known as the section about the four sons - one wise, one wicked, one simple and one who doesn’t know how to ask. I have collaged them as female. That will be controversial in some circles and refreshing amongst others. I am a dyed in the wool feminist but this project wasn’t driven by that per se.

How long have you been working on this project?

I started my first collage in 2018. But my work really took off in 2019 until the present day. But I have actually been thinking about creating my own Haggadah even before I started my artistic life.

How many collages and illustrations are you creating? Do you have a fixed number in mind, or do you let the work and inspiration take you?

There is so much to be inspired by in the Haggadah. I was spoiled for choice. Everytime I thought I had exhausted the concepts, new ones presented themselves to me. The ten plagues, in particular, were really fun to explore. I’ve created over 50 collages. I’ve had my most concentrated productive period in 2020 because I finally had a concrete deadline.

How long do you think it will take you to finish?

I’m almost there.

What are some of the challenges you have encountered along the way?

I  had trouble with the big themes like slavery and liberation. I was obsessed with making something amazing and profound. It dogged me. I didn’t want to do something trite. I started so many pictures that I never stuck down in the end. I wanted to expand the depiction of slavery to prompt users of the book’s main duty - to remind Jews that they were slaves once and to be empathetic to those suffering around the world. That wasn’t easy.

Also the translation was a challenge. I have never translated anything before. Instead of “Blessed be he, king of the universe…” a common translation of the beginning of many of the blessings in the Haggadah, I changed it to “Blessed be God, leader of the world”. That was not very difficult. Other passages were much more complex.

In what format and number will the book be created and or printed?

The book is going to be released digitally and in full colour on paper. The number of copies I get published will depend on the success (or lack thereof) of the Kickstarter campaign. I am also having some limited edition hand-bound copies made by the bookbinder Rachel Jackson of Binah Design. I am also going to be making high quality giclée prints of my collages. If the Kickstarter doesn’t make enough money, I will make a few copies for my family and friends to use and think it through again.

Do you have any advice on how to approach such a large project? Any lessons learned already?

If I were doing it again, I might have been more methodical. I might have chosen a pallet, for example and stuck to those limited colours. I might have only worked on A4 or A3 sized paper. I might have had a big box that I would throw my scraps into and store all my Haggadah materials together so I’d never have to go hunting for a particular paper. I might have thought of a certain genre or theme. (There is a very old Haggadah where all the figures in it have birds’ heads. I have made one collage in homage to that.) I’m not sure I could have worked that way. I’m not sure I could have been so disciplined and still have been creative. 

What other professional or artistic goals do you have as an artist once you have finished this project?

I intend to return to painting when I’m done with this project. But in January, I started experimenting with collaging with abstract images from the sports sections of newspapers, onto canvas. Then painting figurative images on those abstract background. Combining collage, painting and printmaking is my ideal. It will be like collaborating with myself. I am living in the present, particularly now, with the Coronavirus invading the earth. But I am excited to see what I will discover next. I am very lucky that, so far, I never run out of ideas.

Check out Emily’s Collage Haggadah on Kickstarter

Emily Marbach web IG
interview: Petra Zehner

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on March 14, 2020

First things first, could you please introduce yourself a little? Where did you grow up? How – and when – did you start to explore art?

I’m a Dutch urban collage artist. A street artist in the broadest sense of the word. I roam the streets of European cities on foot or by folding bike with large shopping bags that I fill up with paper and other trash during my trips. I’m obsessed with this found material that has been weathered and sun kissed, sometimes many years, creating the most beautiful patina on the material. There is so much character in this material. I look especially for this old material.

I work primarily on two series of artworks; masks and portraits. In my masks I focus on visualizing my observations of the world we live in. And in my portraits I pay tribute to characters that inspire me, to game changers and innovators.

I grew up in a small town near the city of Den Bosch in the Netherlands. My parents have always been interested in art, taking me to museum shows and galleries. My father is very creative. I remember as a kid when he was busy making his art I’d be in his little studio space making dinosaurs. I was always building stuff; creating toys, games whatever I came up with. And I remember driving my mother crazy with all the stuff I’d find in the streets and take back home to build toys and other stuff from.

Did you have any artistic role models or mentors growing up?

When I was young the comic books of Storm by Don Lawrence had a major influence on me. The new worlds he created were always mind blowing. I spend many hours drawing my own futuristic worlds and characters. Later on in the mid to late 90’s artists like Futura, Shepard Fairey, Ryan McGinness, Faile, Bast, Swoon and Banksy had a big influence. Banksy is a big inspiration in the way he plays with image and message and how he is able to draw attention to his art. Ryan McGinness for the play with simple iconic images to create more and more complex universes. Bast for his collage style and use of sourced material. I see a bit of all of them in my own work.

I never really had a mentor.

Do you have any formal art training and if so, what – if anything – did it do for you?

I went to art school and I am trained as a 3D designer; product and interior design. It was great to meet like-minded people in art school who looked at the world in similar ways. That was a revelation to me. Growing up in a small town I never felt like I fitted in. So meeting other creatives was very nice. I learned a lot in art school and working in the design industry later on. One thing I was trained to do is to always push yourself to take an extra step. Have high standards for yourself and demand high quality work. Make meaningful work not just pretty pictures.

You are a street artist. How did you get there? Was it something you chose, or did it choose you?

Street Art has been a major influence on me. The DIY punk attitude is something I like a lot. Just go out there and do it. Don’t wait for things to happen, make them happen. It’s an act of rebellion, opposing the system and express what you think needs to be said. And at the same time beautify the world we live in by adding art. What’s not to like.

I started out putting up stickers, posters and later stencilled posters. As my work evolved I also put up my masks in the streets. I use paper sourced in the streets in my work so putting it back up in the street is a natural consequence of what I do. It makes the circle complete. I just couldn’t find a way to make the paper durable as it is vulnerable. Coating it in resin made it look like plastic and lose all what attracts me in this material. I finally found an alternative material to make my mask weather proof and keep the looks I want to have. I have been putting up work in the streets ever since.

You work under the name Perishable Rush. How did you come up with it and what does it stand for?

For me my name represents the current zeitgeist. The focus in society is on speed. We have to get rich and famous quickly and live up to the idealistic images imposed on us. We are hounded and driven to purchase things quickly otherwise we are too late. To be successful quickly otherwise we are a failure. To make a profit quickly otherwise we are not doing well. Making a fast buck and greed reign. I always thought Perishable Rush would be a good name for a band. As I don't play any instruments and was looking for a name to represent who I am and what I do Perishable Rush only seemed fitting. It is a conversation starter.

How would you describe your style in your own words?

Urban Collage. I’m not a classical street artist nor a classical collage artist so I decided to come up with a new genre; Urban collage.

You collect all the materials you use in your collages in the streets. How did this way of working develop?

Most material I use is from the streets. But I also use art prints, posters, clippings from old comic books and books. I source the material I need for a specific piece. I don’t want to restrict myself by using only material from the streets. What I want to express is most important and I use whatever I need to get that done.

I started out making collage from remnants of test screen-prints that I had laying around in the studio. Later on stencils were torn to be part of the collage pieces I did. I wanted to add more colour. And one day I bumped into a spot in Amsterdam with thick layers of posters nearly coming off the wall. I took some of it and never stopped using that material since.

Is there a political, social statement in there somewhere? Or was it an aesthetical or practical choice?

My political views and social statements are intertwined in my ski masks. I see a lot of things going on in society that I have to react to. The best way for me to do that is through visual communication.

My portraits are more my aesthetical outlet. Those are more playful. More about my passion for the material I source. The structures and colours I find.

You are currently working on two series of artworks: masks and portraits. These are almost polar opposites: either hiding or showing personality or individuality. Is it me reading this duality into your work? Because it could also be seen as two sides of the same coin.

My masks are anonymous and about expressing how I look at the world. The mechanisms I see at play in our society. In my masks I work with concepts and stories. My portraits are looser, more aesthetical.

You say on your website that you are paying tribute to characters that inspire you. Who exactly inspires you and why?

Well, there are quite a few different characters that I have portrayed so far. I’ve portrayed musicians, artists, athletes and movie characters. I’m a big fan of arthouse artistic movies. A Clockwork Orange for example has had a deep impact. I first saw the movie in art school because of the stylised interiors. I was struck by the world created in the movie, the ultra-violence, the sets, the social, political and economic comments. The story centres around Alex DeLarge, played by Malcolm Mc Dowell, the charismatic anti-social leader of a gang of thugs on a very violent crime spree, their capture and the rehabilitation of Alex. A very inspiring movie both aesthetical and statement wise.

My portrait style works best with people and character with iconic looks. I make icons of icons. So the looks are also very important.

If you could host a smallish dinner party and invite anyone you’d like, dead or alive, who would it be? And what would you be talking about or doing (aside from eating obviously)?

Banksy, Nicolas Winding Refn, j Dilla, just chill and talk about creating and inspiration.

You’ve been doing this for a while. How has street art changed? It’s become quite hip. Is it still running from the police in the dead of night? Or more commissioned work and galleries?

I’m a studio artist foremost. I need time to work on my pieces. I cannot make them on the spot illegal, it would take too much time. I make my street pieces in the studio and then only have to put them up the walls. So I can work really quickly. I like working in the streets a lot. It’s a big rush to see how they work in their natural habitat. But studio work is my basis. I like to make work that lasts. Street work can be gone really quick. I did a run in Paris, put up work, dumped my gear to come back for a photography run and the first piece was already gone. If you’re lucky pieces stay up, if you’re not they last hours. That’s all in the game. But that alone doesn’t satisfy my creative need to make lasting work.

Street art has changed a lot. There is a lot of commercial work out in the streets and the galleries that is made with the single purpose of making money. Work that lacks creativity and originality. But that is all part of the game. Of anything that becomes popular or successful. I don’t mind. I do my own thing and create from the heart. That is all that matters to me.

Do you make any other kind of art?

No. I have so much more to explore in the direction I’m going right now. I have the tendency to experiment and not finish. I need focus to finish work before I start something new.

How do you define creativity?

The ability to create something new, original and inventive. There is creativity on so many levels. I used to train martial arts and I remember reading about Masaaki Hatsumi the taijutsu grand master. He said that every profession has it’s own taijutsu, a best way of doing things. That is something that always stuck with me. I’m always looking for the best way to do things. Understand how things work, then play with it and make it your own.

What are your words of wisdom for someone just starting their creative journey? What kind of advice would you give?

Make work that matters to you.


Perishable Rush: web Facebook IG
interview: Petra Zehner

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on March 04, 2020

Could you please introduce yourself a little? Where did you grow up? What is your background?

I grew up on the East Coast, in New Jersey, close to NYC. I went to college at University of Michigan where I got my undergraduate and Masters degrees in Art History and Museum Practice. I was a photographer from a very young age and wrote my thesis papers in the history of photography; my Master’s thesis was titled “Photomontage and the Montage Sensibility. ” I wrote about the many approaches to photography that involved multiple images. Researching some of my papers I worked in the Rare Book Room at the New York Public Library, a beautiful and extensive academic and visual resource. This famous library is turning 125 years old this year. This building was the inspiration for the facade of Unbound, the building we are taking to Burning Man in 2020. 

When did your artistic interests begin?

My passion began when I got my first camera in 3rd grade at a time when kids just didn’t have cameras. Later I built a darkroom in my house and would go into NYC to see exhibitions. I remember the first photo exhibition I saw in NYC’s Light Gallery that was showing the work of Ray Metzker. His large grids of photographs exposed me to a new way of presenting photography.

What started your interested in collage work in particular?

My first interest in collage was again photomontage. I had this interest in how photography could be seen differently when combined as multiples, most notably the work of the Dadaists and also the large installation work being created in the 1970s. As I mentioned, I then did my thesis in the 1980s on these concepts. My thesis was on the different styles of combining images and how photographers were looking to the environment for existing, layered images that created what I called a “montage sensibility.” 

Twenty years later, after working in museums and auction houses for 15 years, I began making art, mostly using vintage photographs in large grids. I had three small children and had gone through an extensive cancer treatment, so I left work and began making art, really with no training other than photography. So my art practice has been a constant exploration of materials and ideas. I started by sewing photos together, then collaging photos and book parts, imbedding images in resin and making digital collages on a residency in an antiquities collection. For a short time I was working with a variety of printmaking techniques, including photographic solar etchings and adding chin collé to copper etchings. Eventually certain bodies of work didn’t include photography at all, but I continued to reuse found materials that had information in them, what I like to call “old data.”

On your website, you describe yourself as a project-based artist. Could you explain what exactly this mean to you and what made you choose this label – for lack of a better word?

Because each body of work has been a response to the materials I’m using, from my microfilm installations to digital collages, to 19th Century Cabinet Card grids, I felt that each body of work looked so different than the last that I thought of each series as a project. All the bodies of work show my interest in repurposing materials and a curiosity of the meaning of aging and deterioration, as well as the information that these objects hold. Even when I drip house paint on used vinyl signage, information about the color of paint that people in my town are picking to use is of interest to me. The exploration of materials and how they age has become the thread throughout my work and a metaphor for the journey of a human life.

You create collage and mixed media pieces and also take photographs. Do you work in any other media?

I have enjoyed printmaking, but still found myself collaging or putting chine collé on etchings. I also build on a large-scale art crew, David Best’s Temple Crew. We have travelled around to build non-denominational temples for people to visit and heal themselves. As many as 600 people have volunteered to build a single Temple with us. It is incredibly hard physical work, but I love the people I work with and the power of the art. I often do big art builds twice a year for a month or longer. These temples are built to be temporary—as is life, and are often burned.

How would you describe your work in your own words?

My study of the history of art and my experiences working with museum collections have impacted my art making process in multiple ways. I have always collected objects and find that I respond to those that are full of information, whether in their age, the data they hold, or they way they reflect the ideas, vision or handiwork of another person. Deconstructing thrown-away objects reveals their structure and former function while also exposing unique histories.  I incorporate, and also bury, old data from these objects as a way of respecting and preserving the information and the object's former function. The work explores concepts around time and deterioration as well as human communication of information, while revealing my interest in surrealism, politics and even humor.

Where do you find the materials for your pieces? Or rather, how do you choose what to work with and what to discard?

I mostly work with materials I find for free at various recycling places, or from estate or books sales. I choose the objects that speak to me through their materials, shape or age.  I have always been a collector of old photos and objects, the only difference is that I now use them in my art.  I get all the project’s books  for free after the monthly book sale in Palo Alto, near where Stanford University is. They sell or dispose of some 40K books each month. Many books are collected by people to send to other countries, many are picked up by obsessive collectors and many must be discarded.

So many of the books I have trouble cutting into because of their beauty, their subject, their illustrations. I often look them up on-line to find them selling for very little. But some I still cannot repurpose. So they are given away or used as whole books. But when I do cut into a book, so much is discovered in the hidden bindings or how the linen was attached to the davey board and how it looks after you pull it off the cover.

When volunteers come to help me they often say, “Oh no, I’m spending too much time looking at these books,” and I always tell them that is part of our art making process. Respecting the materials, enjoying them and learning from them.

You are currently working on a large project called UNBOUND for Burning Man. But before we go into this, could you explain what Burning Man is and stands for?

Burning Man is an experiment in creative, temporary living in the harsh environment of Nevada’s Black Rock desert—an ancient sea bed at 4000 feet above sea level. 75,000 people create a city filled with art for one week of the year. Some artists, like myself, spend a year building the art that they intend to bring though the City only exists for one week.

Burning Man has 10 principles, which can be found under its philosophical center, which we hope to live by while there. It is expected that everyone will participate in some way and give their services, passion, food or something to the community. I build art but we also have a group that has a ‘Theme Camp’ which is the Black Rock Tea Shop. Our gift to the community is we serve tea and alcohol and at night we have live piano sing-alongs from 8-10pm. It is a unique community building place and I have the most diverse friend group that I have met from building art there over the years.

And now to UNBOUND. It’s a big collaborative project between you, your husband, and other artists and friends. Could you describe what it’s all about?

Yes, my husband, Dave Nelson-Gal, and I have been designing this large piece together. Unbound is a library-- a temple to human thought, altered by time, space and energy and collaged with over 3000 deconstructed books infusing the piece with a debris field of ideas. Emanating from the walls are recorded readings contributed by individuals from around the world. This piece is meant to reveal the boundless potential of human thought, creativity and collaboration as well as question how time can change our understanding of what once was fact.

In the multiverse, havoc has created the Unbound library, a 3-room building that defies its purpose and its state of being. Is it disintegrating or under construction? The open, criss-crossing roof beams expose the library to the elements; and the walls, void of book shelves, are clad in old book parts.  This space becomes a visual, physical and conceptual backdrop for spoken words that emanate from the walls--words, poems, writings--that have been contributed by people around the world.

Ascending the stairs, one chooses to enter one of three arched doors, each of which introduces a different human path: the physical, the spiritual or the intellectual. The doors look through the building to the rising sun, while shadows are woven from the slatted roof. Sconces and glowing chandeliers of book pages hang in each room. There are benches and stairs for sitting. A library table and curiosity cabinets, with found and created book objects, offer further reflection into the materials.  

“Multiverse” is the theme of this year’s burn so we are imagining Unbound to be deconstructed Library from another universe.

How do you feel when you deconstruct a book?

Respectful and in awe, maybe a bit like an autopsy. Some books are simply too beautiful to take apart and I put them aside hoping I will find another use for them in their original format. One person commented on my Instagram feed imploring me to leave the books in their original format. My husband reminded me that none of us are in our original format. Time impacts, and ultimately ravages everything.

The books I gather for free are generally headed to a shredder, another hoarders home, or to a non-profit organization that may ship them abroad. Because non-profits are allowed to go through the books before they are offered for free to the general public I feel no guilt giving these books one last expression, even if in a very different format.

When we cut off the covers, we are often excited to share what we find on the bindings. Tucked into the book interiors are often letters, tickets to a show, notes and other ephemera which we keep to highlight them in boxes of curiosities in the two side rooms. The signature pages and marginalia are also parts of the books that are special.

Tell me a little bit about your ideas on deconstruction as an art form?

Deconstructing objects, even when they have been discarded, is somewhat of an act of courage. Knowing the object can teach you something beyond what is immediately visible is exciting but also hard. Objects become so precious. An artist is initially attracted to the object for a particular reason, whether it’s about the shape, the age, the damage or its history and we often don’t want to alter it. But choosing to go deeper into the object, may expose further beauties or reveal its individual history.

I found a weathered old leather satchel at a garage sale once. The leather was so perfectly aged, and the hand marks of the previous owner were clearly revealed. But I took apart the stitching on the sides and found that comic strips from a very old newspaper had disintegrated and were now clung to the inside wall of the leather. I laid it flat, coated it in medium to protect it and considered it a finished piece of found art. Working with the books is similar to this. We never know what we are going to find when we start poking around.

UNBOUND is scheduled for August 2020 if I’m not mistaken. Since when have you been working on and preparing this?

We decided to make this piece right after Burning Man this past September. We were inspired and encouraged by various artist friends and decided to commit the year to making a piece.

We spent the first months thinking a lot about how the structure would look. I’m a two-dimensional artist and I knew the surface of the piece would be covered in book part collages, and conceptually I knew what I wanted to present, but the structure took more time to solve. We finally ended on creating a 3-room building inspired by the front of the New York Public Library which happens to turn 125 years old this year. I love the library, its look, its function and the personal history I have with it. I used the Rare Book Room there while I was in graduate school.

I began collecting books for free after the monthly book sale in October. Each month friends come and help Dave and me gather about 400 books.

This January we were lucky enough to find a temporary location large enough to build in and we moved in on February 1st. I have been collaging small detail parts of the piece and this past weekend we officially began to build.

What will happen to the installation and structures after Burning Man?

We are constructing the piece in components, so we can more easily assemble it on the windy Playa. This also allows us to deconstruct it and bring it home more easily. Because it is likely too big for most other venues, we hope to show it outside of Burning Man in new configurations. We may reconstruct the center structure, or create a new structure from the walls.

It’s a huge collaborative project. Are you looking for contributions and if so, in what form?

Yes it is. Like many Burning Man installations, we have a core team that is helping us with everything from cutting, building, engineering and fundraising to helping feed the crew on Playa. Volunteers are invited to come by on certain work days and help as well. Sharing the build with people is really a big part of the experience.
We have also applied for a grant from the Burning Man Foundation to help with the costs. In addition we will also launch a fundraising effort through Indiegogo, or some similar site. People who help fund the project will receive gifts that range from necklaces made out of book parts to large sections of collage from the walls.

What do you feel is the value of collaboration with other artists?

The collaboration is probably 50% of the project. While the final structure will hopefully engage thousands of people on the Playa with both its visual complexity and its sound, building with so many friends, old and new, is really the heart of the project and what we will remember the longest. It’s 6 months of work, mostly on weekends, compared to a few weeks on the Playa. My husband and I have worked on many art build crews and love the camaraderie. It is really special to be doing this now for our own project.

It makes sense that many of the people who come to work on this project or connect with it are lovers of reading and books. Everyone has a story from childhood about what voracious readers they were and how books have defined them. I love these stories, but these are not my story.

Languages and reading were hard for me as a child and I didn’t read a lot. I love reading now, but I am still a slow reader. My memories are more visual and involve a love of what the books looked like, the illustrations in them or the languages they were written in that I could not decipher. 

My father was a physicist and I loved looking at his pages of 6-tiered equations. I have used some of them in my art over the years. But I never was really driven to learn what they meant—I was just fascinated that he spoke an abstract language that I didn’t. To me it’s like looking at Chinese or other languages with completely different alphabets. I love that other humans communicate in a way I can’t understand. One of my favorite activities as a student at the U of Michigan was to walk through the Graduate Library Stacks and look at the Chinese book collection which was the largest outside of China at the time.

Another favorite activity in graduate school, which could be reproduced today on the internet, but was so much slower and more tactile, was what I called shelf reading. I would go to a section in the basement of the Art History Library, stand in front of the 19th-century sculpture section for instance, and look through every page of every book. I was able to do some original research this way, but mostly it transported me to another place.

Libraries have always been a symbol of the vast amount of information I will never know, but possibly could. A record of what humans collectively know together. I hope that Unbound in a small way will illustrate the overlapping, complicated and sometimes conflicting information that we believe we have mastered.

Julia Nelson-Gal web IG
Unbound web IG 
interview: Petra Zehner

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on February 26, 2020

Would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself? Where are you from and what’s your background?

My name is Nazario Graziano, and I was born and live in Italy. I am mainly an illustrator, and since about 2002/2003 I work a lot in publishing and for international brands.

As I wrote in the bio on my website: My world is romantic, ironic, dreamy, with good background music. I like to think of it as... “A dive in the past with gore-tex lifesaver.”

Do you have any formal art or design education?

No. I am self-taught. I have always had a passion for everything that was graphic, illustration, photography, design, and I liked to buy books (including school books) on this topic that I studied alone, privately. My education was immediately the experience in the field. First in a few web-agencies, then in graphic and communication agencies. I started working in this area when I was around 20 ... for about 10 years before officially becoming a freelance illustrator. It was a good apprenticeship, very hands-on.

Would you talk about your development as an artist over the long term?

I always feel the word "artist" is too heavy, especially considering how it has been abused in the past few decades. I consider myself essentially an illustrator and at the same time a happy person who figured out how to turn a passion into a (creative) job. Over the long term - I don't know, creative work is always evolving, so you can never stand still or feel like you have arrived, but have to always experiment, research, and find new paths and ways of communicating.

The collages and the works I create today are different from what I did 10 years ago, but also from the ones I did in 2018. But the fact remains that if I analyse them carefully, each of them tells something about me, of a certain period, of my visual language of those years, and obviously of my inner world in general.

What originally drew you to collage?

Nice question, and one that I have answered many times. I'm not sure what and where the origin is... I think it was a natural expressive element that came out when I was a kid. I remember that after school I used to draw on sheets, then I added heads, arms and other elements, or I created strange creatures and characters cutting out various items from magazines and newspapers. I believe some of the things I have done when I was 8 or 9 years old would in some ways be in line with some of the things I do today.

Especially in your personal work I can see a lot of music and film references. I somehow picture you as someone listening to music all day long and happily working along on a number of projects. Anyone’s dream. Well mine at least. Who or what are your influences?

Exactly, you got it right!!! That's it. I believe that without music I would not be able to live, even less to work. The references and influences are infinite and change constantly, also because I am basically an omnivore, a researcher, and curious by nature. I go from jazz to punk, from ambient to HIP HOP, from Pink Floyd to The Clash ... and in between all of this, there is all this new stuff coming out. I listen to music for about eleven hours a day, sometimes even in bed, and I always discover new things. Music, like art, is infinite, and full of stimuli. Recently, I discovered very interesting and very stimulating things about Ethiopian music. When I find something I like (not only in music), I go to the origins, I study it, I absorb it ... then maybe I get bored, I get saturated, and I look for something else. New inspirations, new ways. The only thing that never bores me are the Beatles, lol.

Can you describe your artistic process when you sit down to work on a piece or series?

We are talking about artistic collage here, so I avoid talking about commission related processes and commercial briefs. The free or personal works are my favourites, and they are the ones which allow me to express myself to the fullest and to experiment with new paths and new techniques. As I often say to the people who attend my workshops, inspiration can come from anything, especially when it comes to collage. And this is 100% true for what I do myself. Sometimes I start from a face or from a photo that inspires me, sometimes from the phrase of a song that is playing on Spotify, sometimes from a word I find in a newspaper, sometimes from an abstract element or simply from a piece of paper with nice colour ... and slowly, starting from that element, I create a story, visions, images, a world, a language.

You work both digitally and analog. Do you have a preference and if so what and why?

Analog collage is currently a purely artistic form of expression for me, personal, perhaps primitive, and a little naive. A sort of therapy, a moment of relaxation, but at the same time, it allows me to discover and experiment with things that I also apply to digital collage and to commercial works. I can't discern the two collage modes ... although technically they are different, at the end they merge into one "world", a bit like Yin and Yang.

You are not afraid of colour or patterns and your collages are rather explosive and abundant. How would you describe your work yourself?

No, and that relates to what I said before about research and the evolution of my collages. It's true, lately, I have started to work a lot with brighter colours rather than muted tones. It has been a long creative process that has also shaped my analog collages, and that has brought a stronger emphasis on colour choices rather than on graphic and photographic elements. But then again, the opposite thing happened some time ago…

Do you work in any other media?

A few years ago I combined acrylic paints and oil pastels creating a sort of mixed-media. I haven't been using that technique lately. I try to keep the collage as pure as possible. As for other media ... I really like calligraphy and hand-lettering (I have an Instagram page I find hard to keep updated www.instagram.com/helloblackdrop). I have also started to study the art of sign painting. I bought paints and brushes, but I would need 36 hours in a day to do everything.

You do a lot of commercial work. Do you think there is a division between design and art?

There is certainly a difference. Art has no rules ... design, publishing, advertising and advertising design yes. I speak from my point of view, differentiating my personal (free) work from commissions, with briefs, many directions to consider, and a series of revisions, which are necessary but which obviously make you lose some spontaneity. A lot also depends on the client who commissions the work. There is commercial work where the client respects the artistic side of the illustrator very much and gives you carte blanche, and others where you risk cold compositions determined by dozens of rules to follow. There is conceptual work where you are a little freer to create, and others that is very didactic and where you are a little trapped. Needless to say that artistic or conceptual work is my favourites, and the one that is obviously better with a stronger visual and artistic impact.

The bio on your website mentions your daughter, wife and your cats as a source of inspiration. Does your personal life play a big role in your work?

Absolutely. I am surrounded by women, and each one has a fundamental role in my life ... and also in my work.

What personal or professional aspirations do you have for your work in the future?

As I said before, I am happy to be able to do a job that I love, and this in itself is already an aspiration achieved. 2019 was a positive and important year for me, not only because I celebrated ten years of being a freelance illustrator, but also because I saw my name and some of my works in connection with ever larger brands and very stimulating and important projects, and with new possibilities and openings on the anolog collage front. So I hope that 2020 that has just begun will bring other stimulating work and projects like those of the last few years. Maybe this interview will be a bit of a lucky charm! Let's hope...

Thanks Petra ... and thanks PCC.

Nazario Graziano: ︎ ︎ ︎
interview: Petra Zehner
translation: Francesca Mazzucato

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on February 19, 2020

Could you introduce yourself a little? Where are you from and how did you start to explore art?

My name is Sam Heydt, I am a recycled media and social practice artist born and raised in NYC. My interest in art was sparked at an early age by my father who himself is an artist. 

Do you have any formal art training?

Yes, I have a fine arts degree in Photography from Parsons School of Design in NYC. Although my academic career traverses a number of other universities: The New School, Cooper Union, University of Amsterdam, University of Buenos Aires and La Sorbonne, wherein my focus ranged from anthropology to gender and media studies, and linguistics.

You have a degree in linguistics. How, if so, does this affect or reflect in your art practice?

Just as much as I regard art as its own language, I believe language informs art.  Language structures reality. For instance there are certain poetic expressions unique to an idiom, such as the French term ‘esprit d'escalier’, or ‘spirit of the staircase' which refers to a clever comeback arrived at after the fact. Other languages are unique in there articulations of emotions, such in the case of the German word ‘Fernweh’, ‘farsickness’ in English, which communicates the desire to travel to faraway places. In short, languages can expand your vocabulary of perception.

You describe yourself as a social practise and recycled media artist. Could you explain what these terms mean to you? They are quite specific compared to more generic terms like collage artist, photographer or film maker. What was the process like that made you choose these titles?

As the sustained narrative of tabloids becomes history and the myth of progress continues to perpetuate inequality, social practice art emerges not only as a means of spreading awareness but as a catalysis of activism and discursive exchange between social systems and art. As a lifelong environmentalist my concerns over the exploitation of the natural world carried over into my work.  Further, my preoccupation with up-cycling, recycling and conservation inevitably informed my practice and led me to later coin the term recycled media in aspiration of furnishing a broader definition that would encompass the diversity of approaches I was employing. Recycled media art refers to the sourcing and reinventing of found material as the basis of creation, often trespassing their associative use. The artistic approach sits at the axes of affichiste, decollage, assemblage, lettrism, mixed media and up-cycling.

Do you see a difference between collage art and recycled media art?

Collage art doesn’t differentiate, but is rather defined as recycled media art.

Can you describe your artistic process when you sit down to work on a piece, or series, film or documentary?

Typically I have ten projects in process at once in my studio which I bounce between, gravitating towards whichever one inspires me most at the time.

You have travelled and lived abroad a lot. How does this affect your work?

My experiences living abroad have unquestionably shaped the aesthetic and direction of my work. Although a life long environmentalist and social activist, my resignation to work as a social practice artist came from my time in Australia and New Zealand documenting the deforestation and mining industry there, as well as my time in India producing a documentary on caste based child prostitution. Life experiences have also played a critical role, as my shift from photography to collage and direct animation stemmed from the bedridden months in Iceland following a motorcycle accident that I’m lucky to walk away from.

You work in many types of artistic media, including photography, film making, graphic and interior design. Are there ways all these different media inform each other?

While often relying on found objects and recycled material as a basis for creation, I oftentimes employ new media to resurrect “old" static media forms.

Do you find that you express different sides of yourself in each medium, or do you communicate similar themes and concerns regardless of the medium?

Through a myriad of mediums and technical approaches, my work speaks to similar themes and concerns that of entropy and mankind’s exploitation of nature. It aims to present an abstract proposition for a world on the periphery of history, one that not only appears haunted by the ghosts of the past, but built on it.  

Which themes, ideas, or messages do you feel are particularly present or significant in your work?

Working across different media- film, video, installation, photography, sculpture, sound and text, I present the problematics of a world exploited beyond use and increasingly reduced to a bottom line, one marked by mass extinction, product fetishism, diminishing resources, and patented seeds. The uncertainties and inevitabilities of which are drowned out by the the white noise of the media and the empty promises it proposes for the future it truncates. My layered imagery aims to conflate time and place, colliding and merging generations of possibilities, and disrupting logical relationships between occurrences. Through adding and subtracting meaning by combining images of destruction with portrayals of the virtues born from the American Dream, I confront the disillusionment of our time with the ecological and existential nightmare it is responsible for

You founded your own studio that offers creative consulting, digital marketing, graphic and interior design. Could you tell us a little bit about your decision to go down the art entrepreneur road and the process that led to the actual launch of your studio? It’s quite an impressive achievement on top of everything else you are doing!

I founded Jane Street Studio, L.L.C. in the Meatpacking District in 2012.  Having graduated with a fine arts degree in photography, launching the commercial studio felt like a natural trajectory for me at the time. Since established, the company has expanded to provide both design and marketing consultation in addition to photography and art direction.  It's growing roster of clients span Europe, North & South America, Asia and Oceania. Over the last several years however, I have shied away from commercial projects and shifted my focus to work of more personal meaning.

How do you bridge the gap between being an artist and an art entrepreneur, if you even feel there is a gap? Do you personally make or see a difference between commercial art and art with a capital A?

There’s definitely a disparity between the two rooted namely in the motivation behind the works creation as well as the creative constraints that come with the territory of commercial work.

You are incredibly and impressively prolific and diverse. Is that your personality? Something you grew into? Necessary these days? All of the above?

It is probably a side effect of my experiences and ADHD.

Are there any exciting projects you are currently working on? Do you have any big plans for the future?

I have a number of upcoming exhibitions I am currently preparing for in the long term am trying to open an orphanage in India that takes in and educate young girls that would otherwise be funneled into prostitution.

Who are some of the artists you admire?

Artists I admire include: Tom Deininger, Guerrilla Girls, Hannah Hoch, Rauschenberg, John Baldessari, Deborah Roberts and Edward Burtynsky.

Is there any advice you can give to aspiring artists or creatives?

Don’t get discouraged, don’t quit - it is the disguising factor differentiating those who succeed and those who don’t.


Sam Heydt website
inteview: Petra Zehner

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on February 12, 2020

As always our first question, could you please introduce yourself a little?

I am originally from Leicester, a city in the Midlands of England, UK. I now live in Lowestoft, which is the most easterly town in Britain.  I loved art from an early age. My parents were working class people who, thankfully, encouraged me by simply allowing me to draw and play with materials. I think I was about thirteen or fourteen when I first made a collage.

I trained in Fine Art, completing my degree in 1980 and a post graduate qualification in Art and Design Education in 1982. I became a teacher of art and design and have taught in a wide range of educational establishments. During this time, I always tried to maintain sketchbooks, pursue ideas and create art when possible although the commitments of working full time and family often made this difficult!

What about collage as an art form speaks to you?

Collage is immensely satisfying as a medium. It can be quite immediate and spontaneous and also encourages playfulness, allowing for chance juxtapositions and “happy accidents”. In teaching art, I found that collage was great for preventing students getting frustrated with a perceived lack of drawing skills and allowing them to express themselves quickly and freely. It is also a great medium for working in series: I often have three or more collages on the go at any one time so I can work across them without getting too precious with any one image. This way also allows you to “pause” a work to allow reflection without feeling you’ve stalled completely.

Do you work in any other media?

From my degree years onwards, much of my work had a conceptual base so photography often played a big part in terms of being able to record an idea. Textual work has always been a big thing. I am intrigued by the relationships and tensions between text and image. I also do work which involves making small interventions, be it creating a subversive text for a found booklet of instructions or leaving small pieces in the urban environment. I love playing with ideas and have always felt it important not to be too concerned as to where the boundaries are between disciplines. I think this attitude was as a result of being an impressionable student on an experimental course in the punk era!

Describe art school in the punk era. What was that like? What were you up to?

The late 70’s in Britain was a very exciting time to be a student. It was a politically charged time; the miners’ strike, riots in major cities and street clashes between the fascist national Front and the Anti-Nazi League. Margaret Thatcher was dividing the country. It felt like a time of upheaval and change. At Leicester Polytechnic the Fine Art was divided into two departments; “Painting” and “Sculpture”. Needless to say, students pushed against this and painters worked three dimensionally and sculptors painted. Experimentation was encouraged, however, and we had access to a “media-handling” area where we could explore film and sound recording (several student bands were formed here!) as well as traditional black and white photography. There was also screen printing and other printing studios.

The punk ethos was very much a “do-it-yourself” attitude; make your own fashion, make your own music, make your own art. Whilst not all of us were punks in appearance, I do think the sensibilities pervaded the work and attitudes of many of us and many of us were also pretty left-wing politically. I revisited the art school some time later and it felt like it had become a “printing school” whereas, during those years, students produced conceptual works, printed, painted, made art language pieces, filmed, animated, performed, became human sculptures, made music and even gave fictionalised lectures as art works. I remember it as a time of constantly, constantly talking, debating and arguing about ideas and art.

I was more and more seduced by conceptual works and became interested in using the banal and mundane, personification, context and how text alters the perception of an image. Thus, I found myself transporting a white painted trestle table around various locations in Leicestershire and photographing it in a variety of locations and positions! My final show largely consisted of several series of 20” x 16” photographs of the table with accompanying captions alongside an installation of mundane but malfunctioning objects in a domestic setting.

How has art education changed over the years?

Government funding cuts have had a big effect on art (and music) education at primary and secondary levels in England and Wales. Although the standard of teaching is often high, time and resources are squeezed. Unfortunately, the overloading of the curriculum in general as well as the increased focus on examination results and accountability has often led to a fear of risk taking and a reluctance to stray from a proscribed programme of study. Of course, it also depends on the ethos created by the school hierarchy. At the tertiary level, art establishments are still exciting places to be and students, in general, are expected to display a higher level of professionalism in their practise but there is great variety between institutions. Some institutions develop a definite “house style” whilst others champion individual exploration and experimentation. Unsurprisingly, the quality of the teaching staff is key. I have been fortunate to have recent experience of working at this level and have been impressed by the academic rigour that is encouraged and the creative education students receive but am concerned about external pressures on these art departments.

Is formal art education necessary? Useful? A waste of time and money? What’s your opinion on art and art education as or in an institution?

From the earliest times, humans have made songs and sounds, stories and dances, and have created and left marks. Art is fundamental. It is a way of saying “I was here” …

But …

… formal art education is absolutely necessary! We receive so much information visually, we are bombarded by imagery, moving and static. Obviously, you don’t necessarily need a formal training to be an artist (there are plenty of examples that prove that!) but everyone can benefit from a “visual education” that art and design provides and at an earlier age the better! In a time when people’s mental health is becoming a major concern and self-harm amongst the young is on the increase it is more necessary than ever.  This is why it is so worrying that art and music are suffering at the primary stage. Also, a good art education is an education in critical thinking and encourages a questioning disposition and with the increase of fake news and the discrediting of expert knowledge or scientific fact by the powerful, we need more not less critical thinking!

Back to collage, what’s your thing, analog, digital, or both, and why?

All of the above! I love the physicality of cutting and pasting paper but some of my collages have been created solely from scanned material, my own photographs and internet sourced imagery. Sometimes I create a physical collage which I scan and then work on in PhotoShop. I try to not restrict myself and would rather let a piece take me where it wants to go.

How would you describe your own collages or style?

Well, that’s tricky for me really. I recently completed and posted a collage every day for a year because I needed the discipline of such a challenge but that meant that I wasn’t going to get too hung up about style or, to be honest, worrying overmuch about concepts of quality. I just allowed myself to explore everything that came to mind or to hand; minimal, quirky, satirical, autobiographical, accidental. In general, though, I’m drawn to things that develop an internal narrative and I love things that work in series. I have an on-going project which involves reworking vintage sepia prints of the Tivoli Gardens from an Italian publication and another single mixed media piece which is concerned with dissent, disorder and oppression. These pieces are long term and demand a different approach to quality.

What is the Tivoli Gardens project and where can we see it?

The Tivoli Gardens project is not online anywhere as I do not intend to post/exhibit it until it’s complete (and I don’t know what that means yet!). I have however, included a few images to show work in progress. It has involved taking the book apart and physically collaging on the pages. They will be reassembled, possibly in a new order to create a free-form surreal(?), non-linear(?) narrative. There will be a tangential, disrupting (?) text on the facing blank pages. Parallel to this will be a digital version based on PhotoShopped images from scans of the manual collages.

You are the joint custodian of the George Kaplan collection. Who is George Kaplan?

Ha! George Kaplan was a character from a Hitchcock film who doesn’t exist. Many years ago, as Fine Art students, six of us invented a fictitious artist with that name and faked his artwork, biography and related ephemera. (Ironically, I have recently discovered a real artist of that name with a profile on Saatchi Art). Some time ago, I resuscitated the bogus George to allow me to post artwork in a variety of media semi-anonymously on Facebook. It was a way of being free. The character may have been fake but the intention was that the work was always executed with integrity.  For the last twelve months or so, “George Kaplan” has been a vehicle to post the progress of an on-going collaborative collage project called “The Splendid Fabric Assents.”

The collaboration is in the form of a game. How many are you? And how did you come up with the idea?

Yes, it’s a game played by picking a series of “Chance” cards shared between the participants that contain a set of instructions ranging from the literal to the absurd. They are designed to be reflective and encourage creative and lateral thinking. They are a definite nod towards Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s “Oblique Strategies”. The name is a fragment from playing the Surrealists’ “Exquisite Corpse” game. The original idea (not that anything is truly original …) developed from a practical mixed media project designed by myself given to groups of 16 to 18 year old students to develop risk taking and creativity. I revised it so that it could work as a collaboration between participants who were not geographically close.  I approached an old friend, artist/photographer Mike Tupling, who spends a lot of his time in France and between us we agreed a starting point (a loose collage of three pages from a random magazine. The pages were chosen by taking the house numbers of places I had lived in as a student). We both have an identical set of cards and draw one per move. Each player is free to work with any combination of analogue and digital processes. When we are content with the stage of development, it is emailed to the other person with an accompanying rationale for the move. A copy of the collage is posted on George Kaplan’s Facebook page and a high-resolution image is retained by the sender. We have a loose time scale as we only have to satisfy ourselves but obviously the larger the number of players the more the need for a tighter schedule. We set an arbitrary and provisional number of 12 moves for the first game.

What do you feel is the value of collaboration with other artists?

When musicians perform in a band, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. It can be the same with a collaboration; it’s an enriching and rewarding experience that can’t work in the same way as a solitary one. Like the card instructions intend, you have to respond to unexpected developments which challenge you and this can become a growth experience.

How about challenges? What happens when a joint piece of art isn’t going in a direction you like? Or rather, because dislike in itself isn’t really an issue, what if it is going somewhere you really, actively dislike or object to, be it aesthetically or thematically?

Any collaborative enterprise has to have a set of guidelines. We have called them “Rules” because we liked the idea of imitating the sets of rules contained in board games. For any game to be fruitful, participants have to work with those constraints so any drawn card must be interpreted with integrity within the move. Participants are free to add more elements of their own and to make aesthetic judgements but the whole nature of this as a project is that process is far more important than outcome so in many respects you are already putting like/dislike to one side. The chance elements in the game create opportunities rather than inconveniences.

Any thoughts on art and ego in this context?

It depends how comfortable you are with abdicating elements of control. There can be a tendency for Western artists and musicians to feel that they have to be in control of everything or to know exactly why something is in a work. Others are more relaxed about the idea of “letting go” and allowing a process to have a prime role. I used to be obsessed about everything having to contain a clear intellectual meaning and purpose, now I am happy to try to create contexts where meaning develops more organically and/or haphazardly. In this regard, ego takes a back seat and, hopefully, open-mindedness and acceptance come to the fore. Thus, when the game is played with several participants, it promotes an environment that is in keeping with the collective ideal. I firmly believe that this is how we grow as people too …

Geoff is currently developing a version of “The Splendid Fabric Assents” game for Paris Collage Collective. Keep an eye on our projects and news sections for more information. 

Geoff Litchfield on Instagram
interview: Petra Zehner

first published on Glacial Collective Prose, our old online magazine, on February 05, 2020