Art + Place

Postcard collage 2018, Thessaloniki

Placemaking has become the buzzword for current artistic practice, but what is the art of place? The idea of making art ‘in situ’ which responds to and is made in a particular location are some of the key elements of “placemaking” activities.

I realise I have doing this in small ways through my daily artworks for the past 10 years. Even a trip to the neighbourhood supermarket has inspired one of my daily collages. In the past few years I have been lucky to research and create art about a specific place on artist residencies.

But it wasn’t always like that.  When I travelled to Samoa in the 1990s I had no idea that I would later use the patterns of the fabrics I had collected to inspire a series of artworks relating to place.

It took nearly thirty years for that Samoan trip to be visually expressed in collages for a small solo exhibition called Travel Boards. Each of the travel inspired square wooden boards related to my travels to various places including New York, Ethiopia and Mexico. They became a sort of placemaking ‘retrospective’.

This idea of documenting travel for creating art meant that when I travelled for three months through Europe in 2018, I made not only a daily collage on a postcard, but also small collages on shipping tags. Some of these I look at now and think how fresh and raw these are. Scraps of paper torn from bus tickets, maps and restaurant menus which took less than five minutes to complete.

In comparison, the collaged postcards were more resolved with papers overlayed in a delicate dance of conceal and reveal. They were constructed upon the original photographic image rather than created from scratch.

Perhaps it is this experience from all those travels and art about place which prepared me for creating my most recent series of postcard size artworks in Iceland. These were based around cyanotype prints, which were often torn apart then stitched back together to form new collaged images.

The works I will now make in my home studio as I reflect on my experiences travelling through Scotland, Iceland and Greenland will be slightly different from the work I made while I was there and in the moment.

However I will use these and my photos as mnemonic devices to take me back into those moments of experience. I hope to be able to instil the exuberance and exhilaration I felt when travelling, into this new art.

Daily shipping tag collage 2018 England

Shipping tag collage 2018 Macedonia