Texts
Oscar Dooley on Mythos by Anita Andromeda
Sirocco Journal Nº3
2025
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:
“The resulting image [strikes] the viewer as both unified and fragmented. The distortion is in full view but paradoxically, lends itself to the unity of the image which itself depends on the sense of movement created by the intervention.”
Rather than compare both artist’s collages, I would like to extend Adams’ remarks to Andromeda’s work. Examining any of the four images featured in this article and indeed the rest of her projects, the effortless movement and unity between the fragments, is as Adams mentions, found in the act of intervention in her images. However, this intervention does not disrupt the viewer’s gaze or disrupt the interplay of the fragments. Rather, Andromeda’s cuts and placement are precise, they respect the forms present within the original images whilst simultaneously allowing movement to traverse across each fragment. The interlacing of cloth, limbs and score marks turn the collages from cut and mixed images into coherent and symbiotic forms. Yet the movement present within her collages is not limited to its interior relationships, Andromeda pushes the boundaries of each image past the expected frame. The harsh monolithic edges of the cut photographs are as striking as the effortless forms which dance within her compositions. They rise up and beyond the image’s borders, allowing the flow of fragments to spill past its boundaries and into an inky abyss.
Yet for all the movement and motion present in her work, there remains a profound stillness within each collage. From the impossibly large and jutting cut edges to the cascading folds of fabric and limbs, Andromeda’s collages appear as single photographs, capturing and suspending the oscillation of her pieced imagery. Treating her collages as photographs, I find that there is sombre silence present in each one of them. I feel that I am looking at a single frame beautifully captured by Andromeda and that the fluctuating performances of her work have continued to move and shift into new arrangements. The conflicting movement and stillness within her work seem to warn that what I am looking at now, will not be the same if I look again.
When I initially started writing about Andromeda’s collages, I glanced over the fact that the images I was writing about had all come from the same body of work titled Mythos. Upon reflecting on the project’s title, I felt that my understanding of the work was recontextualised and that the enigmatic nature of her collages was replaced with a sense of mysticism. I suddenly understood why my initial search for comparative artists and works ended unresolved, I realised her work was far closer aligned with the forms of mythology than collage. Andromeda’s collages mirror the recurring narratives which make up our oldest and most celebrated mythologies, as she pieces together fragments of stories and voices into vivid tales. The images within Andromeda’s collages present themselves more as fragments of ancient tales, of which their dispersed origin and placement are pieced together and speak in unison.
I started this article by stating that I didn’t initially understand Andromeda’s work, that her collage acted differently from how collage usually acts. I stand by this statement, I don’t fully understand each collage, or how it acts on the page, but I think this is why I like Andromeda’s work so much. I enjoy getting lost in the rhythm of her compositions, letting my eyes trace the lines of her cut marks and witness an image expand and fluctuate in front of me. Like a myth, her work starts from scattered origins and builds into complex and fascinating structures. And like a myth, it is in constant flux, ever-changing and evolving, ensuring that I am always drawn back to see what Andromeda’s work will show me next.
All Rights Reserved – Text © Oscar Dooley
Images © Anita Andromeda