Do we live in a gigantic material world collage?

One only has to walk down the high street, turn on the television or even simply open the living room curtains to be bombarded by our consumer-orientated, material world. It is a world that suffocates in visual information, a world saturated with mass-media advertisements. I use techniques of collage as both a direct metaphor for contemporary life and as a tool to regain control of this barrage of disparate imagery.

The world of advertising and its powers of communication are a fundamental concept behind my work. I am fascinated by the process of taking an image out of its everyday circulation, whereby it has disappeared into its use, and to reinvent the image through my paintings. This process dismantles the original intentions of the advertiser and yet still allows me to communicate with the same power. By means of the traditional language of oil on canvas I celebrate imagery that I feel is overlooked in an attempt to make the contemporary world visible.