About the Work
A Way to Make Pictures
My work is perhaps best viewed through the conceptual lens of collage-based art, though I generally call the results constructions or composites. Whether working digitally or by hand, using a variety of found and hand-made text and image fragments, I try to create unified compositions and unexpected structures.
I am interested in the formal presence of hand-made, material abstraction as well as the hands-off results of generative — sometimes code-based — compositional strategies. I enjoy silence, suggestion, content and process in alternating mixes. I’m more printmaker than painter — sometimes more programmer. I welcome the expanded material possibilities of contemporary art forms, though I still feel like an artist just looking for “a way to make pictures.”
A Way to Draw
An early basis of much of my work was the photograph. Over time, initial hand-made photocollage works involving multiple snapshots evolved into more abstract, digitally composited images. The camera became a way of gathering visual elements for a palette from which I could compose an image by hand, serially or even generatively using self-authored code. Photographs were material to make marks. The photo-composite was a way to draw.
A more recent interest in emphasising the evident manipulation of material and to minimise ways of working that tend to leave little trace of the human hand — the camera, the printer, the computer — has resulted in constructions which more readily display how they were made.
june 2021
The phrase a way to make pictures is a fragment of a quote from an unremembered source attributed, at the time, to Jasper Johns. The full quote is: “I’m just trying to find a way to make pictures.”
