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Engaging analogue processes across image, design, and jewellery, Sirocco Studios is an art and design practice dedicated to creating experiences that value commitment and care.    + Learn more
1.
Oscar Dooley’s interpretation of Anita Andromeda’s series Mythos

Oscar Dooley is a writer and photographer who lives and works in London.



When I first started looking at the work of Anita Andromeda, I was met with a series of images that I didn’t quite understand. I knew that they were incredibly intriguing collages, yet not like those which I had seen before. Upon starting to write about her imagery, I had expected my usual search for referential comparisons to begin, hoping that finding someone else’s work to compare to hers would help my initial understanding of her work. From Hoch and Heartfield to Rosler, Kruger and Stezaker, I began my interpretation of her spliced fragments attempting to search for a starting point from the scattered history of collage. Yet I remained unanswered. Not because her work doesn’t fit within the ranks of artists past or that of her contemporaries, but because her work appears to do something different, something more subtle, more organic.

Amidst Andromeda’s cut and pasted photographs, are meticulously interwoven blending pictorial forms with wavering hues of back, grey and white. Within her collages, the essence of each image is carefully respected, yet she positions each fragment so that new and powerful forms emerge from the margins of her score marks. She effortlessly blends each image into one another, allowing the flow and contour of their original forms to construct shifting narratives which permeate through her final compositions.

I would like to briefly return to and examine the aforementioned collage artist, John Stezaker. At the start of this article, I mentioned that I wasn’t able to find a reference point for Andromeda’s collages, and whilst this is still partly true, I would like to explore the language used to describe Stezaker’s collages to further speak about Andromeda’s work. In particular, I would like to examine a quote from Parveen Adams’ essay on Stezaker’s work titled, Adding and Taking Away:




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