A Crisis of Identity

This work began as an experiment in collage.

Flicking through a pile of old magazines one afternoon, I began randomly tearing out images of faces I found particularly interesting from the various articles, without knowing what I was going to do with them.

Around the same time, I had been reading about the dada movement and the work of Hanna Hoch, which led me to start deconstructing the magazine cuttings and re-assembling them.

Pretty soon, I had managed to construct a strange composition of a human face compiled of many elements borrowed from a range of sources, which I found curiously intriguing.

From that point, I felt I had to make more of this image and came up with the idea of developing it into a large scale painting.

These 3 images show the initial collage (above) and subsequent sketchbook work in planning the composition for the large-scale painting.

The strip of images below show a 'time-lapse' of the painting in progress which you can view more closely by clicking the far left image and toggle through all the images from start to finish.

In these sketches and drawings, I have paired back and edited out some of the detail in the original collaged image and utilised the random, happenstantial nature of the magazine cuttings as essential elements of the composition.

I also felt it important to retain the contrast of the black and white cuttings juxtaposed with the coloured ones and to incorporate the torn edges of the paper to retain the feeling of the immediacy I felt in creating the collage.

This also had the desirable effect of directing the narrative and the suggested enquiry into the purpose of the work; who, what and moreover, why?