Collage, which after all only means sticking things on to things, is a dangerous trap for the artist. Victorian ladies made screens with the aid of pleasing scraps from illustrated journals: a sort of collage boom ensued and the 'scraps' were specially manufactured. A generation later the three great masters of the form were also its pioneers: Picasso, Ernst and Schwitters each announced different possibilities from the juxtaposition of fragments sought or found. Not all that much has happened since.

The perilous ease with which Auschwitz can be united with the Buddha, or Vesuvius with a phallus, where fact and facture are seductively welded at a stroke, tends to devalue such images before they are done. The technique has largely fled to the world of graphic design.

I have crept tentatively around this minefield off and on since art school days, only succeeding when I found ways of making the process difficult by some rule or limitation or (as in the series of Composers) set theme.

The simplest (à la Victorian Lady) use is just to make an omnium gathering, as in the border of Curriculum Vitae XI which merely speaks of the 'magpie days' of its text. The only sophistication here is that the ephemera of those days (not so long gone by) has now to be bought rather than found: a penny platform ticket from the fifties costs five hundred times that amount. Once beyond the middle years the past is so expensive.

This scrapbook form, open to accident but structured by a narrative with some unity of reference, is the basis of A Dante Diary which had no idea at the outset of the kind of story it would end up telling.

More eccentric is the outer border of Curriculum Vitae XX which is made up of fragments of my own past work taken from Works/Texts to 1974 Some of these are reproductions of collages in the first place, here refragmented and, in this book, re-reproduced by the same printers. Another kind of scrapbook-cum-diary in which collage of all kinds has a prominent role is the series of unique books Humbert's Obliterated Rhymes.  > >

tomphillips.co.uk  > >  Sculpture and Mixed Media