"First We Take Manhattan" Collage

I have been mutating, mutilating and reconfiguring popular culture and its images since 1990. Much to the consternation of my mother, more than one school report observed that I was “off in a world of my own”. To be frank I found immersion in the world of the imagination to be much more captivating than learning maths on a hot summer afternoon, and I still feel that way now.

My work is all about other worlds and realities; I’m very interested in what these might be like. I also have an enduring interest in the world of dreams and how they can be self-contained yet also be populated with characters and objects from waking life. The untethered mind will come up with some crazy recipes using familiar ingredients!

I try to translate this into my work by taking recognisable or familiar images and recontextualising them, placing them in new environments to give them the ambiguous suggestion of symbolic significance. The result, I hope, is what a friend of mine once referred to as “a mixed-up world of meaning and non-meaning”. The viewer is encouraged to find their own interpretation of each piece.

Another key theme of my work is layers: literal layers of images cut and pasted into the collages themselves, as well as layers of meaning – on one level they are mandala-like patterns of images, on another level an amusing and/or cute picture, and on another level sometimes a wry social commentary.

I like to think that viewers can appreciate my work on any or all of these levels, and I try to pack them with lots of detail to reward careful and patient inspection. Examples of this include a clown and a kitten driving a moon buggy, Jesus dribbling strawberries like basketballs, and Abraham Lincoln’s head on a duck (a deliberate nod to the artist Mark Ryden). I’m very much inspired by Stephen Biesty’s “Cross Sections” books, which were packed with a wealth of intricate detail that I spent many happy hours poring over as a kid.

My work has been featured on CD covers in New Zealand, the US and the UK. I have been profiled in San Francisco art magazine Churn and New York art / fashion magazine Fifth Avenue. I have exhibited pieces throughout New Zealand, in Germany and Sweden, and briefly – and very much unofficially – beside an Andy Warhol piece at the Museum Of Modern Art in New York.

In January 2010, I was profiled by NZ arts show ‘The Gravy’ for their episode entitled “Time Travel / Future Worlds “. You can watch the clip below.