Kevin Brady: New Collages

What is given is incomparably richer than what we can invent.
Aldous Huxley, "Variations on El Greco," On Art and Artists

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"

I like the deliberative processes of collage - the heightened awareness of elements in play, and surprises that occur when unlike pieces meet and mate. Like drawing, collage is a very direct form of visualizing onto a surface. It is not just a language of accumulation - of stuff added to stuff - but a restless exchange of figure and ground. Structures come into being, and turn away from what they had been. Boundaries are fixed and erode. Identities appear and shift shape. A collage can go through hundreds of adjustments before it arrives at its final state, and even then, it is - to quote Wallace Stevens - "form gulping after formlessness." The destructive and constructive principles exist side by side in the most intimate kinds of decisions here. Found materials, for me, impose a discipline of responding to what is given. To some extent, I have to resist the impulse to design and control, even as this may be what is most needed. In the end, the collages are aimed at producing a symbolic, if provisional, unity.

Kevin Brady, December 2007

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