My interest in collage art started during artist residency in Iceland. I became fascinated with recording my experience and studying how my memories evolve. I started by taking a lot of photos and discovered how different the visual documents were compared to my organic experience. To recreate the moments I started to cut the photos up and work in collage format.
I suppose the great tragedy of photos is, that they render the world flat, while not only our vision but in my opinion also our thought process is three-dimensional. When forming memories, not only the moment itself is recorded but more importantly connections are made to many previous experiences and even unrelated information.
When I remember a moment in my past, it is not a coherent video clip that replays. I am much more likely to remember a bunch of details. I often have a specific color that comes to mind. Connections made in the moment become part of the memory. I might remember the state of things - extreme dust of the cracking of paint. But not the objects that were thus affected.
The segments do not appear in any orderly fashion. They pop up, overpower each-other, form layers and interact. They form a collage. For this reason I find it important to use traditional methods, my intuition requires layers and materials to interact. The results are often rather abstract and lacking a clear scenario.
Most of my work incorporates photographs as b&w material to which paint and other materials are added to as a recollection. Usually these are photos exclusively taken by me but as I've experimented I have also used cutouts from old soviet-time albums, as well as created some works that focus solely on other materials. These pieces I think have more to do with dreams than memories.
My passion is experimentation and found materials. Each glued piece has a story not only of shape and color but also as a material which has it's means of production and then the environment where it has been found. I use these untraditional pieces to carry most of the symbolism in my work.