‘Carratalá’ Collage

Between September 2019 and March 2020, I embarked on a creative adventure in Spain, living in the ancient and beautiful city of Valencia, and then travelling an hours journey south to the small, medieval town of Javéa. Both are on the Costa Blanca, the easternmost part of the country, and right on the Mediterranean. Soaking up design inspiration and every available piece of paper ephemera with a Spanish flavour, colour or traditional motif, I created this series of paper collages. Wine labels, torn pieces of graffiti posters, old photographs, bits of packaging, old notebooks, museum catalogues, ancient tile designs, business cards, matchbooks, textiles, tourist brochures, Civil War symbols, stamps; you name it, I included it if it crossed my creative path. The size of these small works was dictated by the dimensions of the tiny kitchen table at our Airbnb, which acted as my studio. The finished collages were then taken out onto the streets of Valencia to get some air, to be photographed as I wandered the city, and to see if I really had captured some of the flavour of the city within them. Propped up on ledges and menu boards, rested on Vespa seats and graffitied walls, they became my #takeyourcollageforawalk project on Instagram, and what a great way to connect with an adopted city! These little paper collages encapsulate the inspiring and invigorating time we had there, soaking up Spanish culture and its jubilant, sophisticated aesthetics. This vibrant collage was inspired by a flamenco dance costuming shop I wandered into in Valencia (with their beautiful business card incorporated into it, in case anyone wants to visit).The colours! The patterns! The gorgeous, voluptuous designs! I hope I built some of that vivacity into this collage with these bold colours and pattern rhythms, which are also reminiscent of the tiles found everywhere in Spain. The collage will be framed in an 18” x18” white, wooden museum frame, which is 2.25” deep, with the art mounted in a slightly raised fashion (so as to appear floating) above the acid-free, bright white background within the frame. The glass itself is ‘Museum Glass’, specially coated to make the viewing of the art completely glare and reflection-free (it looks like there is no glass; all you see is the artwork), as well as being UV filtering (an very important feature, as I use fragile, paper ephemera). All mounting hardware is included.