JOHN SMALLEY
artist / teacher
collages / Assemblages
When Picasso and Braque began making collages early in the last century, they were integrating fragments of contemporary urban life into their pioneering cubist compositions: cafe life, newspapers, bits of typography, musicians, musical instruments, portraits of smokers, etc.. The Dadaists and Surrealists took up collage, too, and pushed it into ever more adventurous directions, tapping into elements of psychology, politics, and the absurd. Later in the century, Pop artists adopted collage and again loaded their images with aspects of contemporary civilisation, often employing humour and irony, and blurring the distinctions between high and low culture. The very nature of Post-Modern culture and aesthetics relied upon the collaging of styles and the layering of elements “lifted”out of historical time. Our present digital landscape is largely made up of collaged images, texts, sounds, etc. We should perhaps intuitively understand the nature of collage better than those of any previous era…
Collages under construction, Les Tapies, Ardèche, France 2019
The collages I have been making over the past year have evolved out of an opportunity to mine a cultural/historical archive: a collection of ephemera found in a 17th century hamlet in the mountains of the Ardèche region of southern France. Ensconced there for a year, I immersed myself in the hamlet's history, its stories, its cultural context, (a great deal of that being the influence of the Protestant Huguenots who settled throughout the mountains and forests of the Ardèche in the 17th century), and its “objects”, from handmade farming tools to hymn books and school textbooks, calendars, diaries, and documents of every kind, many handwritten, going back to the 1750s. All of this, I attempted to “process” and then respond to through the mediums of collage and assemblage, and the modus operandi of abstraction, my guiding lights, being the American surrealist Joseph Cornell, the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, and W.G. Sebald, the German author of The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, The Emigrants, and Austerlitz.
Recurrent keys to the work are: the forgotten, the overlooked, the discarded, the partially obscured, the fragmentary, the seemingly prosaic… quotidian treasures… The works, at their best, seem to be the result of a kind of mysterious, almost alchemical process, by which the ordinary becomes perhaps... somewhat extraordinary…
