Not really steampunk so much as jellypunk!

This piece is only tiny – about 10x15cm – but it’s one of my best. I enlarged it to about a metre wide for a show in Wellington a few years ago and was excited about how great it looked. My dream would be to have it blown up and placed on the side of a building as part of .

I particularly love the way the characters fit into this piece so smoothly. The jelly gentleman with his timid pet mouse, the puffer fish lurking uncertainly on the periphery of someone elses conversation (I do that too), and a big benevolent god looking down on the whole thing.

This is where it all began!

I’d played around with a few collages before this but they were, frankly, either awful or just generic copies of the newspaper headline montages that came with Dead Kennedys records. I found there weren’t enough interesting or bizarre headlines to be found in my local newspapers, and I realised that I was never going to find my own artistic voice by copying the work of others.

Parallel Dreams was the first piece that felt like it was truly mine.

 

Something fairly new today, from about this time last year.

One of my favourite things to do with my collages is to play around with fake symbolism: the sea cucumber and toad could mean something important, or they could be simply nonsense for its own sake.

I seem to be all about the eyes with my latest work, I’m tentatively planning an exhibition around this blue eye image that has been at the centre of most of the work I’ve done over the past 18 months.

Another favourite piece, created in the early 2000s I think.

A happy family picnics high above the earth.

Astute observers will note that the mother in this piece is a sly tribute to

It’s hard to say exactly why I love this one so much, just as I guess it’s hard to say why no-one has purchased it already!

165x210mm, collage on paper. Please contact me if you would like to purchase this work.

 

It seems appropriate that the first piece I share in my new “Collage Of The Day” series is the one I consider to be my best work, the collage that should appear in my obituary.

I can’t recall exactly when I created this piece, but it wasn’t too long after I started making black and white pieces using Victorian engravings. I was really excited by the seamless results I could achieve using images from the same era, printed with the same ink on the same paper. My weird creatures had begun to look like they were ‘born’ that way!

I feel like I got the recipe exactly right here, my characters each the perfect blend of organic and metallic. The guy taking his hat off became my mascot, featuring on my business cards and a tattoo over my heart.

Hats Off is probably the only piece I’d never sell. It has pride of place in the small art gallery that is my home and every time I look at it I smile to myself.