Tear No. 15 Collage

My work is referencing walls - their construction and meaning. I am interested in how wall structures and surfaces serve to express ideas and emotions remaining as records of a specific time. I use building materials to make wall-like pieces that I break afterwards. So my work focuses on the process of building up and then tearing away through expressive gestures. My interest in walls started when I found anonymous décollages - accumulated torn posters - on the street walls. I photographed small fragments of those large walls, loaded with thick layers of peeled paper forming intricate compositions, to make once enlarged images that allude to abstract expressionism paintings. I move from capturing the anonymously torn posters of the city to making décollages in the studio - wallpaper décollages. Layers of wallpaper glued with wheat paste and then ripped. Seeking to perform the gesture of tearing found on the street walls, and experience the emotion of ripping off layers of paper firmly sticked together, breaking the accumulated patterns imprinted on the wallpapers. Lately I have been adding layers of building materials used for wall construction like plaster, wood, aluminium and industrial paint. Sometimes I tear out the surface, other times I dig it out, unearthing the hidden patterns and meanings of our walls.