I went to the Rauschenberg show at Tate Modern last week and one of the things that stays with me is his use of collage and multiple images. This is a typical example on the left, Retroactive II 1964: he made screens for many images and then used them repeatedly in different combinations. I can’t put my finger on why I think his collages work but they do. I need to think about this some more as it’s the key to one aspect of where my work is going: how to bring together conceptually but also physically photographs and drawings of different points in my life.
As part of my recent MA Unit 2 assessment exhibition I hung a group of images, some finished, some partly done, some successful, others not so much, to indicate how I want to do this.
The assessors commented that this needed more thought which is fair enough. These pieces were not produced with this in mind, so I was just playing with the idea of layering, making conversations happen between different images. Each image represents a specific time, event or feeling and drawing on my research into memory, I want to explore creating a network of links between these ‘nodes’.