Live collage art

What a wonderful weekend I had at the design fair Blickfang. I came early and was busy making collages all day. I was invited to be a part of the Artrebels and Arkitetministeriets booth. At their booth they promoted a lot of different art and especially the artist from the previous PaperCuts where strongly represented, myself included.

Before the weekend I had a lot of thoughts regarding working in this space. Collages are normally something I make at home, in the privacy of my own company, so I was very excited to see how it would be to work with people around me. All the paper, I used at the fair, was prepared a head of time, so all I had to do was play with the pieces like puzzles. When I sit at home and do collages I usually spread out the pieces of paper over a large table, so I have an overview of what I have to work with. This makes it easier for me to see in which direction the work will go. Because there wasn’t a lot of table space at the fair, I wasn’t able to spread all the paper out. Instead I used a lot of time flipping though folders to see what I had to work with. This was a bit time consuming and I felt in someway that it held me back in the smoothness of the process.

One thing which I found out was extremely positive regarding “being watched” was that I felt more pressure. Normally I lay some pieces of paper together and see how well they fit, and hours and days can pass until I decide that this is the finished pieces of artwork. But here I had no breaks to contemplate, which really worked well for me. So, this is an element I will be using again while working at home; pushing my limits a bit further.

I am also not that good at being talkative while working, I really focus and concentrate. It is like entering “the zone”. This was a major concern for me, I was afraid I would not be able to concentrate if people had questions and so fourth, but luckily it went well and I was not overwhelmed by spectators. It really was interesting to see the spectators around me who also where allowed to play with some of the paper pieces, totally turned in to small children all mesmerized and wanting to play and build the own composition with my heap of paper cuts. It really was a great day, god people and good work outcome.

I know I have been going on and on about my new camera, but one of the things I have been the most exited about is seeing the quality of pictures I can take of the collages I make. I always feel it is difficult to translate the texture and depth of handmade art and to show it digitally. But I must say that the amount of details captured was amazing, and it goes to show that size really matters… in this case the size and amount of pixels.

So have a look at the collages I managed to make during the Blickfang fair, and the following days. They are all glued on a 6 mm hardback A3 canvas. Only the pictures of the collages where taken with my new love the Canon EOS the others are taken with my old love a much smaller Canon.