A Collage Artist In Harrogate, North Yorkshire

I make collages from the ghosts of the archive – engravings, botanical plates, scientific diagrams, and portraits of people whose names we no longer know. I find these fragments the same way I walk: slowly, without a fixed route, watching for things that don’t quite fit.

Walking gives me a way of reading a place. I notice what has been left behind, what has been built over, and what keeps surfacing anyway. Hauntology describes that feeling well – the sense that the past is not gone but present in a different state, still shaping what we see and how we move.

My collages work the same way. I take images from the 19th century – a period of intense classification, expansion, and certainty – and reassemble them until that certainty breaks down. Figures lose their eyes. A beetle sits where a lapel pin should be. A geometric diagram floats beside a bird skull. The logic of the original source is still there, but it no longer holds.

I am interested in what these images were made to do – to name, to order, to possess – and what happens when you remove that authority. What is left is something more honest: a trace, a mood, a question about who gets to be remembered and how.

The walk and the collage are the same process. Both are ways of moving through time as much as space, collecting what doesn’t belong together, and sitting with the discomfort that produces.