Paper City (ongoing)

This on-going body of work has explored the inherent fragile and temporary properties of the materials and images I use in combination with drawing. For Paper City I turned to mass printed media sources including newspapers and magazines for architectural and other imagery that represents the places, information and stories we consume on a daily basis which are meant to be a documentation of our lives. By taking parts of one image in a newspaper and adding them to another, the images begin to feed off each other. New structures emerge that create an opposite or different effect outside of their initial context, highlighting a precarious and fragile state of being similar to the disposable quality of the newsprint itself.

Research focuses on my interest in the places and things used to frame our lives and how we construct our notions of ‘home’ from these. I have increasingly taken on a more narrative approach, whilst archiving collected stories that are set against a 21st century landscape. Sources; newspapers are meant to record and account for events that occur, to document the place we know as our present tense. Surprisingly there is a lack of tension that occurs when this place (home) is taken apart, reconfigured and put back together again to accompany news headlines or to construct a “Paper City”. In this sense home has adopted and normalized the refugee status; transience and redevelopment/reconstruction is part of everyday life.

Work takes the form of both flat collaged pieces as well as 3 dimensional paper structures that mirror the landscape of a built-up urban environment.

Exhibited in:
• Paper City, Franchise Gallery Johannesburg, SA 2004
• Agora, Transition Gallery London, England 2004
• In the Clearing, Seven-Seven Gallery London, England 2005
• Republic, L’Est London, England 2007

Evidence: Images, Invitations, Sketchbook