it happens at night

The "It Happens at Night" series of paper collages emerged organically over time, as I worked (with permission) with the wonderful photographs of Dave Jordano and Gregory Crewdson as the foundation of each collage. The 50 artists of the international analogue collage group called The Collage Club each worked with the same image each week, and uploaded their collage response.

As with all of my collages, I never set out to make a particular thing - this approach seems counter to the wonder of the collage medium, where the hands can act independently of the brain. Instead I respond to the material, and let something emerge through juxtaposition. As I go back into my archive of works to catalogue my collages I'm finding key works that encapsulate my approach to paper-and-glue collage. 

I make a single intervention into an existing work to add an uncanny or mysterious element, creating possible narratives from the smallest interventions. The collage itself is simple but the process of finding the perfect element that can suggest that the world around us is more mysterious and strange than we know. No doubt the original Twin Peaks series had a long tail of influence for me. It’s hard to express how radical that weirdness was when it came to us via basic broadcast TV in Australia. It felt like we had no capacity to understand it, just to be in the wash of its deeply unsettling and beautiful strangeness. The image of Bob crawling over the top of the couch is still the most terrifying sequence living deep in my subconscious.

The single intervention here is the girl fossicking in the mound of dirt. The original photo, from the wonderful book Detroit Nocture by @dave.jordano , showed only the deserted lot at night. This book of photos of unpeopled night scenes was @thecollageclub shared text for cutting a few years back, and each week I created these “it happens at night” collages, depicting uncanny scenes occurring unseen, when the rest of the world is asleep. There are no digital elements, each is a vintage paper element over the actual printed photo. The approach that began with the Dave Jordano night photographs in Detroit Nocturne continued with the photographs of Gregory Crewdson, also used with the permission of the creator.