Early Collage

I made my first collages while I was living in Katoomba in 1996. Well, if the truth were to be told, I did put one piece together while I was at university, perhaps about 1992. It was made from photocopies I has taken from some books and it was pretty terrible, so I don’t really count that one. I did hang onto it for quite a while though, but I don’t think that I have still got it now.

When I started making collages regularly, I was using whatever materials that I could get my hands on, with no regard for the things that I became concerned with later, like paper quality or thickness. Comic books, post cards, rave flyers, catalogues. Anything and everything that I found was considered fair game.

I also had a favourite magazine that I lifted a lot of images from called 21C. It was positioned at kind of an intersection between futurism and pop culture, and I really got into their aesthetic. For example, my piece Secure has quite a bit borrowed from there.

In the early days too, I was talking a lot of inspiration from some of the punk rock collage of the late 70s and early 80s, artists like Jamie Reid and Winston Smith. When I started out, this was the only collage that I was really aware of, so it seemed like that this was the natural jumping-off point. But within this first decade of work, I had well and truly begun to develop my own style.