My collages connect female Victorian bodies with trees, rocks, water, words, maps, commerce, myth, and empire. Out of the past re-emerges an imagination of women as literate, talented, violent, loving, strong, seductive, active, and beautiful.
I prefer to work with old paper. It has a texture that speaks of a different time. Some of the paper I work with is from the Victorian age: 1876 (Withrow), 1889 (The Dominion Illustrated), the Royal Academy Pictures and Sculpture annuals (c. 1890–c. 1910), and more recently, the landscapes of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. These fragments imply connections between bodies, genders, maps, territories and the changing landscape. Fragments of advertising, commerce, empire, and literature combine and draw attention to connections between words, images, bodies, and lines on a map. All these were part of the imagination that shape our own time.
For more than two decades I wrote about what people do with the media they are given: advertising learning a new medium in How to Advertise on the Internet; audiences who pirate, parody and rework the images corporations sell them in The Empire of Mind; ordinary people who make their own stories in Watching YouTube; and explored the possibility of radical change in The Value System.
Following John Fiske, I argued that people make their own meanings from commercial media, whatever its makers intended. The Royal Academy annuals and the railway advertisements were the commercial media of their day, made to shape what a reader believed about women, land, and empire. Collage enables me to reassemble fragments of the past and make new stories out of land, woman, words, maps, and art from another time.
My art practice is a reflection of a cut and paste digital culture as much as it is rooted in the analogue medium of old paper. Old paper that tells us something about what we thought we once were and what, in many ways, we still are.
A survey of how women were imagined in the Victorian age, assembled from the paper that did the imagining.