Multi media digital collages, reproduced as limited edition giclée prints on acid-free fine arts paper.
Throughout my years working as a graphic designer, I’ve always had a need for another creative outlet that was more for myself. At first, creating music filled that void and was an integral part of my life. We End in a Beautiful a Mess was to be the title of my next album, conceived almost 10years ago, at a time when I was facing new challenges after some significant change and loss in my life. Those 10 years have passed, much more has changed, and the album hasn’t happened (yet?). So when the opportunity to do my first public art show presented itself, I realized that the ideas and emotions of that time; for that album, still resonated deeply within me, then quite suddenly everything came together and those ideas and emotions came gushing out. Not as music, but as visual collages. The result is what you see here. A collection comprised of 28 pieces (not all are on display) and divided into 6 groupings. Each grouping with their own unique look, feel and concept, yet all very much a cohesive collection.
My abstract collages are conceptual, moody, expressive, layered, textured and dusted slightly with a contemporary Asian aesthetic. Intended to evoke an emotional response, each piece invites the viewer to step closer and slowly begin to peel back the layers, metaphorically speaking of course, to reveal what it is that they see about themselves hidden in the nuances of this artwork. At the core of each collage are expressive, abstract ink and brush sketches, which I hand painted, then digitally scanned, in order to get them on the computer. I then carefully composed each collage using sources from my collection of original media, such as photographs, photograms, manipulated photocopies, film, flora (pressed and dried), watercolour sketches, marker sketches, black tile grout, found textures, created textures, textiles, specialized papers, renovation scraps, distorted facsimiles, weathered surfaces, dust and dirt, and so on. The source materials used to create these digital collages are all original works and findings by me. Manually created, obsessively collected, carefully curated, digitized, and moderately catalogued in an ongoing process for over 3 decades.
We End in a Beautiful Mess juxtaposes the way things end with how we see ourselves and how we react in those specific moments... when a relationship ends, a life ends, or when our world ends. Do we feel the love and the laughter or only the jealousy and hate. Do we honour and respect the beautiful life or do we only grieve and mourn the loss. Will we feel the warmth of how humanity could all at once be compassionate, thoughtful and caring for all living things or will we shiver uncontrollably as the violence, the divide, the hostility, the greed and the selfishness destroys everything. Nothing is ever that black and white, and no matter how I choose to look at it, I always end up in a beautiful mess.