Aug 14

Aug 14 Collage Your Life

Glastonbury. 2018. From the postcard series 91 Days. Featured in Collage Your Life book, 2022.

“What you make doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you make something.” ~ Collage Your Life by Melanie Mowinski,

People come to art in many ways. Their paths are all different, but the one thing they have in common is a desire to create. To make something with their heart and hands. For me it was a circuitous route through painting to photography to printmaking, then to artist books, papermaking and collage. Always along the way, I wrote.

It was writing that first gave me the courage to discover my own voice. To find the stories in the images, to document my life through a daily practice that I then added collage to. This was so that both hands and head were engaged in the act of interpreting the world and what I experienced.

I started my ongoing daily practice in 2010 as a way for me to hold myself accountable. To know that within a busy life, I had created something small each day. It became a habit which took me along the road to becoming an artist. My daily practice was one I could travel with and fall back on when I didn’t have the time or space to create bigger work.

In 2013 I travelled to the USA to learn more about papermaking and met in person an artist who similarly had a collage, printmaking and artist book practice, Melanie Mowinski. We had both been part of a mail art project for some years, where 3 artists from Australia, and three from the USA created artist books using a different book structure and theme every second month. After three years, Melanie held an exhibition of our books in her community gallery.

In 2020 Melanie invited me to contribute to her collage book she was writing. Of course I said yes! I thought of all the collages I had made over the years, deciding on a couple which were about travel and political activism. The book is finally published and I am proud to say I am one of the numerous artists whose practice is featured in the book Collage Your Life.

Creating collages, no matter how small, every day for more than 10 years has given me a creative practice, a visual diary and ways to work through some of my ideas on a small scale. They are always intuitive, fast and imperfect and because of that, they carry the energy of my thinking and feelings from that time.

Collage became a way to create ephemeral work in my first artist residency in France and a way to explore the different aspects of climate change in my most recent artist residency in Iceland.

It is interesting for me to go back and find the daily collage and accompanying poem I wrote that later became my work Pilgrim which is featured in Melanie’s book Collage Your Life. This was created in response to a refugee who arrived in Australia before the government’s policy of turning refugees away came into effect. He single handedly pulled a small boat to Canberra to protest about the government’s treatment of refugees. And I made an artwork about it.

The pattern of the boat is actually from the Endeavour, the ship that Captain James Cook sailed in to Australia when he “claimed” the country for England. He was in effect, one of the original boat people.

The artwork featured in Melanie’s book was one of 12 collaged pictures I exhibited in my I Was Here exhibition in Lismore Regional Gallery, 2015 .

8-2-14 pilgrim

pulling a small boat

one man makes his pilgrimage

for all refugees