Do you begin to make materials first or ideas first? 

Materials first, always. When I went on my 5 week Kyoto collage residency I set myself the stricture that I wouldn’t bring anything with me, I would only work with materials that I found at markets and my local second hand bookstore. I spent most nights browsing through this tiny bookstore in a local arcade and the owner got to know me and what I liked. It turned out that he had a storehouse of books offsite that he’d release into the store over time, so he offered to go look and bring in things I might like. I love the fact that there was an additional layer of translation in our relationship, in that he was sifting through his treasures with his idea of something I might like. So we had a visual translation process that somewhat bypassed language. I think about that man a lot, 7 years later. It was such a beautifully kind thing to do. The sharing of books is a longitudinal history of kindness. I'm certain that many collage artists have had a vague acquaintance say, ‘I’ve had this for ages, and I think you might like it’. The result of living in these worlds of overconsumption is that often you’re trying to find a home for something with someone who will truly appreciate it. Paper collage counteracts landfill fear.

Do you lay out lots of bits on a work surface and let relationships emerge from accidental arrangements, or do you go looking for particular elements to cut? 

I learned some key things from a fabulous 9 week collage workshop series run by the artist Deborah Kelly in 2017 and one was to cut without composition in mind, initially. She said that for the first 3 sessions (9 hours!) we should just cut, and lay out our cuttings beside us to see the relationships that developed. Our want to lock it down immediately into something prevents all the other, better, compositions that could come by having more elements to spark off one another. My first major breakthrough came that way, just from the pure accident of one cutting overlaying another on my work table. The rest in that series came in a rush. I like to develop series rather than one-off collages, and that first moment of the recognition of ‘rightness’ in the accidental overlay was likely the catalyst for that. In my case the ‘rightness’ is very likely what makes me laugh. I joke with another Social Glue artist that 90 percent of the reason to collage is to make yourself laugh (particularly when you’re living through times where laughs can be thin on the ground). 

What's the longest time that you've held on to a cutting before you found a home for it? 

In one of my first februllage years (I’ve often done every day of februllage and very proud to say that  two social glue members, Anne Chestnut and Jacqui Biffin, have continued to do every day for every februllage) I made a work entirely from a collection of teeny tiny cuttings made 20 years earlier, long before I was a collage artist. They were in one of those paper drawers that used to be the packaging for Callard and Bowsers nougat (I miss both the excellent nougat and the most perfectly scaled boxes for collage cuttings, but I digress). I love working with strictures and limitations and in this instance I decided that whatever I found in that box needed to stay in the exact form in which I found it. I couldn’t cut into them, or add anything, only rearrange them. Strictures so often make for a stronger work. Come to think of it, a lot of analogue collage is like a much less boring kind of jigsaw puzzling, except there’s no predetermined place where that piece needs to go. There is a right place though! We don’t always find the right place but when you find it you know it. That’s why I say to others at The Social Glue that the productive question is not ‘is this work good?’ but ‘is this work successful, for you?’. Did you get somewhere where you felt a click of right-ness. Don’t chase beauty, chase that click, where something comes together in a way that is intensely pleasing but you don’t even know why. 

Do you glue your cuttings, or put them into arrangements and photograph them and put them back into your cuttings stash?

A mix of both. I have just as many unglued works as glued. I might bring them out years later and decide that I should commit to the composition I made and photographed, or I should add or take away some elements (this is unlikely, since I am usually a two-or-three piece collage artist) or dismantle it and use the parts for new work. I’ve been doing a lot of that in preparation for our upcoming show. The glueing part is the hard part, so many ways to mess it up.