Songs of the Wilderness

In 2012, while out hiking the trails during the summer I had a number of owl encounters that were the inspiration for the collages you see here. I had been wanting to do some more artwork and during a hike on the trails at Midland School it occurred to me to craft four different scenes using images of owls and old ruins, and map them thematically onto the four seasons. The fifth image was one I’d composed several years ago and had never completed, but with a little reworking fit well into the owl dreaming motif.

Over the past 25 years I’ve been making collages with images from magazines and books. Most of the collages I’ve made are in color with images sourced from the likes of National Geographic, and other travel and nature related magazines and books. But the very first images I made were from the engravings used to illustrate books, journals and magazines during the 19th Century. And so in some ways these five images hark back to those original works.

Those early collages were initially inspired by the work of Wilfried “Satty” Podriech, particularly his book Time Zone. Satty, in turn, was likely inspired by Max Ernst who produced Une Semaine de Bonte/A Week of Kindness, that also used a similar technique.