My whole career, I’ve worked in a self-coined discipline called Sculptography. My work has blended fine arts with photography with upcycling with sculpture as I’ve created unique sculptures made from objects that I’ve sculpted into creations and photographed. I’m so proud that my fine art prints have been sold in galleries and at art fairs around the world.
As a follower of my work, you know that lately, I’ve been inspired to move in a slightly newer direction. And the latest work borne out of this new creative ‘era’ for me is ‘Paper Cuts’, my latest series!
PAPER CUTS - Daybreak; 6.12am - Partial Sun.
As you can see, some of my classic sources of inspiration (namely plant life!) remain present in this new series, giving ‘Paper Cuts’ some shared DNA with my previous collage series ‘Photo Synthesis’ as well as my more sculptographic work present in ‘Blurred Lines’. But ‘Paper Cuts’ also possesses a totally unique point of inspiration, namely, the theories of French philosopher Hypolite Taine.
Paper Cuts - Eventide; 7.06pm - Overcast
Taine was well travelled, and said of his journies in Europe that “Holland’s flat horizons have little to offer. The air is always hazy, which makes all the contours blurred and indistinct. It’s the small touches that matter most…what we notice are the nuances, the contrasts, the values and tonality of the colours. The shades of brightness and the gradations of colour are astonishing… a delight to the eye”. This really awoke an urge in me, a desire to emulate the changing nuances of a particular place, of a specific time and day while considering the content of each collage. How could I manipulate light, shadow, collage and plant life to depict nuanced evolution?
The result is ‘Paper Cuts’. I endeavored to created frozen temporal (dioramic) tableaus in a process that is probably my most painterly to date (and also using my experience with styling and arrangement!) I developed the collages by combining real objects with photographs and reshooting them, creating a waterfall effect that leaves the viewer (you!) to determine the exact nature of what they are examining. My hope is that by blurring the boundaries between nostalgia and surrealism, the new reality of these artworks juxtaposes the nature of authenticity and time.
I also continued to experiment with how I could manipulate light, colour and scale through collage, resulting in this visual investigation of how an observer relates through a portal, to a moment frozen in time. My photographs of the own collages aim to render your relationship to the subject matter one step removed (because you’re looking at an image of an image). This distance should challenge your typical relationship to the essence of photography while simultaneously reinterpreting my overriding sculptography technique_ in all my series’ the artwork is a capture of a moment in time before it is disassembled.
I hope you enjoy the latest work as much as I enjoyed creating ‘Paper Cuts’! You can shop them here and soon enough, enjoy them in your own home!
Anna xo