My journals over the last decade or so emerged from my seeing myself as a potpourri of often competing images, scraps, fragments of experience seeking extension, connection, completion, resolution. It was years later, after I had been making collages in my art practice that I came across Kurt Schwitters’s observation "Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments. It was like an image of the revolution within me . . ." If we want to explore the ways in which alterations in one area of a life imposes upon others and resonates through the entire self, then we as collage makers first imagine the self as a composition of images, an intricate maze of connotations and transformations. This is the model of the self as collage.
I see the collage art as having great power to reveal the relationship between everyday concerns and basic fundamental aspirations and struggles of the self. These aspirations and struggles I call core images, are attached in my memory. I explore the medium of collage on personal grounds to record my life as memorabilia. In my visuals, the narratives come from familiar stories of the regions, from classical mythology, from spiritual beliefs, folklores and from societal expressions. I use personal histories and archives, such as family photographic albums, to stress the importance of the personal as the political, and personal histories as communal political narratives. Through my collages i try to communicate with my emotions, and the parts of myself that i am blind to or that which have remained unsaid.
In an important essay “Why Draw? A Conversation about Art.”, Donald Weismann, collagist, painter, and teacher, writes about the collage as a psychological model. He suggests that, "the 'operations' I experience in making collages have proved to be models for what I do and for much of what I have done with just about all the bits and pieces and stuff and things and events and occasions of the entire life I live." (Weismann 1974)
"Adults and children sometimes have boards in their bedrooms or living rooms on which they pin pieces of paper: letters, snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings, postcards. On each board all the images belong to the same language and all are more or less equal within it, because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the room's inhabitant. Logically, these boards should replace museums." ( John Berger 1972)
