Recipient of the Artbox Commission Graduate Award.
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PAPER DETECTIVE is an exploration of non-destructive collage, digital reproduction, and the symbiotic nature of culture and media. Clippings from 90s comic books and fine art books are recontextualised to create modern stories and poems. What was once a super villain’s monologue is now a musing on the realities of addiction, a romantic portrait now a broken family, a wandering monk now an existential being. Words of affirmation and scorn sit side by side, creating new narratives with which to examine our cultural state and its trajectory.
Works are created through a method of non-destructive collage, a process where clippings are collected from various sources and stored in binders. When creating a work, images are arranged and scanned at a high resolution, allowing large high-resolution prints to be created. This approach allows clippings to be used multiple times, and become ongoing characters, locations or concepts within the world of the collage. Instead of destroying each clipping as it gets used, I want to respect the printed image by allowing them to live on in other works, and be seen at scales not possible through traditional collage.
Collage is a therapeutic art practice, taking the stress of image creation away, letting the participant purely flex their artistic eye. In the years following my recovery from addiction, finding activities that acted as an outlet for frustration and mental energy was paramount. Collage was something that allowed me to talk about my experience using the media I comforted myself with, this is the foundation on which Paper Detective was built.
My work aims to help elevate the medium of collage and recontextualise how we understand the practice. In my personal practice, I approach the work as a photographic process, cutting paper apart, and then recombining it into a flattened printed image, ready to be cut up again for future collages.
